IT IS but a few weeks since my brother wrote to announce the birth of twin boys. I am however so firm a believer in the necessity of propagating our kind that nothing gives me more pleasure than to see all my able-bodied friends and relations devoting themselves to this end. I hope you will have a dozen. If you want to give them careers, send them off to the colonies young when they can forget English swellsdom. Remember that your rotten old English society can’t last another generation, and that new roots are desirable to old trees. A good lawyer, physician, engineer, architect, or editor, can command social position and pecuniary ease in every country except Europe, and upon my soul I consider England an impossible place to live in except for elder sons, or men of extraordinary abilities, or position. You know that though a democrat and sceptic, I am not fanatically inclined, but I do occasionally thank God that fate did not make me the younger son of an English country gentlemen and put me in the Army or the Church. Of all the forms of English lunacy I ever saw, those two seem to me the most astounding. I would like to send your infant a gift, but as the resources of America are curiously deficient in articles suited to the purpose, I send the advice as above, more valuable than gold or precious gems.
Seriously however, I am overjoyed to hear of your triumph and hope one of these days that the young gentleman will do me the honor to visit my lowly mansion and recall to me the manners and features of his papa and mamma. I will try not to instil democratic ideas into his baronetical mind . . .
Meanwhile I suppose Lady Cunliffe and you have already settled his entire career in life and that in your minds he is already an elderly gentleman maintaining a dignified position and dispensing a generous hospitality at Acton. I think indeed there can be little doubt that he will be much too grand a personage ever to be quite in sympathy with American friends, and therefore I look in truth to his younger brothers as the real objects of my future care and affection. The older representative of a venerable but decaying political system will be above my aid.