as _you_ are not 'too grateful' to _us_, why don't
_you_ write? Pray do, my dear friend. Let us all write as we used to
do. And to make sure of it, I begin.

Since I ended last the world has turned over on its other side, in
order, one must hope, to some happy change in the dream. Our friend,
Miss Bayley, in that very kind letter which has just reached me and
shall be answered directly (will you tell her with my thankful love?),
asks if Robert and I are communists, and then half draws back her
question into a discreet reflection that _I_, at least, was never
much celebrated for acumen on political economy. Most true indeed! And
therefore, and on that very ground, is it not the more creditable to
me that I don't set up for a communist immediately? In proportion to
the ignorance might be the stringency of the embrace of 'la verite
sociale:' so I claim a little credit that it isn't. For really we
are not communists, farther than to admit the wisdom of voluntary
association in matters of material life among the poorer classes. And
to legislate even on such points seems as objectionable as possible;
all intermeddlings of government with domesticities, from Lacedaemon
to Peru, were and must be objectionable; and of the growth of
absolutism, let us, theorise as we choose. I would have the government
educate the people absolutely, and _then_ give room for the individual
to develop himself into life freely. Nothing can be more hateful to me
than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass. As
if the hope of the world did not always consist in the eliciting
of the individual man from the background of the masses, in the
evolvement of individual genius, virtue, magnanimity. Do you know how
I love France and the French? Robert laughs at me for the mania of it,
or used to laugh long before this revolution. When I was a prisoner,
my other mania for imaginative literature used to be ministered to
through the prison bars by Balzac, George Sand, and the like immortal
improprieties. They kept the colour in my life to some degree and did
good service in their time to me, I can assure you, though in dear
discreet England women oughtn't to confess to such reading, I believe,
or you told me so yourself one day. Well, but through reading the
books I grew to love France, in a mania too; and the interest, which
all must feel in the late occurrences there, has been with me, and is,
quite painful. I read the newspapers as I neve