Brownson was much pleased to receive a letter from Fifine. He has suffered a good deal from his eyes and from the rheumatic gout enlarging and stiffening the joints of the fingers of his right hand, mainly due to writing too much. But a little rest will make them to recover. He is to continue his connection with the Tablet and to be paid $20, an income of $5 a week, still too little. Father Isaac T. Hecker and he have come to a good understanding, though he is inclined to think Hecker has already forgotten it. The thought of reviving the Review is wholly abandoned, and he was revived his original purpose of putting the substance of what he has published into a series of four or five volume, "The American Republic" making the concluding volume. The first is "A Refutation of Atheism and Palse Theism," about one third written. He hopes to have it completed by the spring. The subjects of the others Brownson had told Henry. They will be the Mysteries, the Church, and Ethics, natural and revealed. The materials are in what he has already published, but they have to be moulded into shape and rewritten. Together, they will be a Summa Theologica. Brownson has sent to the Catholic World an article on ontologosm and ontology or true and pseudo-ontology which, if Father Augustine Hewit does not have the migraine and suffers to be published, Henry will read with interest satisfaction, as it shous the agreement of Brownson's philosophy with that of St. Thomas, and the exact point of divergence of Liberatore and Tongiorgi and the Jesuits generally from St. Thomas, whom they profess to follow, but do not. He has also sent to the C. W., and it is in type and the proof read. A revied of the Cosmic Philososphy, or Herbert Spencer's "First Principles of a New System of Philosophy" which Brownson commends to Henry's notice. He is not quite intellectually superannuated, if old and infirm, still determined to do his best to finish the work which was given him to do, and which he ought to have completed years ago. Brownson does not like the political outlook at all. Grant will be renominated and reelected and the protection policy will be continued, the old Whig policy, "Take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor", heavy taxation, large and extravagant expenditures, and consequent public and private corruption. No statesman seems to be aware that all taxes for the benefit of capital are necessarily borne, not by capital, but by labor, in the shape of increased cost of living. The true policy of the country is light taxation and free trade. The great fault of our statesmen has been to make what should be a great agricultural and commercial people prematurely a great manufacturing people. This was a necessary policy for England, with a dense population and a limited territory. It was a blunder for us, with a sparse population and a territory embraoing a continent. But the great industrial corporations have got the control, and the government is simply their factor. The outlook in Europe is gloomy. The French Republic is a farce. Thiers is no statesman, and the old Catholic populations are afraid to say their souls are their own, and meekly suffer themselves to be governed by the enemies of God and man—sheep who submit to be devoured by wolves. The Holy Father holds on to the civil powers for protection, when they spurn him and seek only to enslave the Church, and secures for religion all the odium in the minds of the people attached to the governments they detest and seek to overthrow. He hopes still to see his temporal sovereignty reestablished, apparently not seeing that the restoration of the status quo would settle nothing, and that the events we deplore would in a brief period occur anew. Christendom will be reestablished on a republican, not a feudal or a monarchical basis. The Church should let go the arm of flesh, and trust to her resources as the spiritual kingdom of God on earth. There is a rumor that Fordham is to be given up and that the Jesuits are forbidden by the General to found any more pensionnates. Can anything so good be true! Love to all. :: III-3-a A.L.S. 4pp. 12mo.