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  A valued Irish friend, a frequent traveler and resident on the European Continent—here is an extract from one of his late letters to me:     Dresden, Saxony

¶" There has been much more interest here, more sympathy and more indignation felt about the Presidents attempted murder, than if he was a European sovereign. From all sides, I think, the world looks to America; we love our own lands as much as you, but we feel that the future of the race is being decided there. Political corruption and public dishonesty are instinctively felt to be far more significant, occurring in America than in Germany or England, and we have been hearing so much about them lately that everyone's mind  has been bent in expectation towards each new President, each striking turn of events in the U.S.; thinking that the time has come at last when something will be done to justify our hopes. We have thought we saw it being done since—Garfield's election—Hercules letting in the cleansing flood. Now, rightly or wrongly, this impression has been immensely strengthened. When we heard the President was dead it was as if we heard of a martyrdom. Now that the reports are more and more favourable everyday, it seems to us as if the good cause had assuredly triumphed in the first wrestle. I don't know how far these impressions of the state of things are true; but they have verisimilitude. I liked so much all I could hear of President Garfield.  Is it not wonderful and inscrutable that out of the confusion and slander and insidious intrigue that seems to attend every Presidential election a man like that should have emerged? Things look to me every way as if the people were awaking.

I see your friend R. M. Bucke has brought out a book on 'Man's Moral Nature'—I must get it. I saw it noticed & praised in the 'Spectator' a few days ago—the critic said that "Mr. Bucke appeared to be an ardent admirer of Walt Whitman—hence, perhaps, some of the obscurities in the volume—which, we candidly confess, are beyond us." The Spectator is an excellent (weekly) paper—thoughtful, honest, manly; Radical in politics, but in religion belonging to   that rather vapid sect, the Neo-Christian or Broad Church. Barring this latter particular there is a very great deal in the 'Spectator' which might be written out of you; and I have no doubt that if you had thrown your works into the form of systematic treatises and written in a strictly refined cultured and gentlemanlike way, you might have gained the approbation of the Spectator, possibly even of the Saturday Review, to which latter journal you are still a thorn in the flesh, of the first magnitude.

We have left Bad-Elster, the baths having perfectly restored my wife's health to our great joy. And we are now pretty close to Dresden, about half an hour by train, living in two rooms in the [cut away]