"I throw these leaflets in this and that direction as feelers. Of course more can be printed when wanted….
"With best regards,
"I am, yours,
"F. W. Newman."
"15 Arundel Crescent, Weston-super-Mare, "3rd Jan. , 1887.
"Dear Friend,
"You need not think me dead yet; but you easily might, so estranged am I to Manchester.
"Yet I at least have life enough to be able to wish all welfare and blessing to you and yours in this New Year. The accumulation of letters has always thwarted me when I have tried to find your last letter…. I seem to remember that you then told me of the marriage of your eldest daughter and of the literary efforts of another. Since then we have had the overthrow in the W.K. of the Safe-Harlot-Providing Law, and indeed it must have been as early as 1885; and the episode of Mr. Stead and his prosecution was later! A great moral change has been wrought (for the better, I say) in our ladies by that wickedness of our ruling classes with the aid of wicked medical theories provoking indignant protest. To drag printed matter into daylight is no doubt very offensive; but without sweeping it away no sound health is to be expected. The ladies, I fancy, will now, more perseveringly than men, keep in activity the Purity Society. And if some of them seem a little too active—I ask, how can this odious system of sin, crime, and cruelty be crushed without hot enthusiasm? And where was enthusiasm hot without partial error? Fire burns!
"This reminds me of my sending you (at your request) a load of anti- vaccination literature, and I am wondering whether you were able to turn it to service. THAT monstrous iniquity must come down; but the medical schools and your Irishmen block out our movement.
"I wonder how you and Mr. Kingsley look on Mr. Gladstone. I never condemned his measure, though I have always (for years back) declined to aid a Parliament for all Ireland and still more the expulsion of Irish deputies from the English Parliament…. But I did not intend here to enter Irish politics further than to indicate that while I am anti- Gladstonian, I cry 'Ireland for the Irish,' 'India for the Indians,' 'Egypt for the Egyptians,"—come what may to the English 'Empire'! [But I have never read in history of any empire being ruined or harmed by Justice, Mercy, or Purity.]
"I suppose I must say, 'Alas!' that the older I become [81 last June] the more painfully my creed outgrows the limits of that which the mass of my nation, and those whose co-operation I most covet, account sacred. I dare not (unasked) send to friends what I print, yet I uphold the sacred moralities of Jew and Christian [Hindoo and Moslem] with all my heart. Two mottos, or say three, suffice me:—