"10 Circus Road, London, N.W.
"My dear Nicholson,
"I hope that the capture of New Orleans, now fully attested, pretty well tranquillizes your mind, and justifies us in believing that we see the beginning of the end.
* * * * *
"Events have not even yet taken the scale from the eyes of deluded people here. I still hear on all sides the doleful lament that 'the successes of the North are much to be regretted, since they can only prolong the war.' Mr. Gladstone [Footnote: Then Chancellor of the Exchequer.] has just printed his recent Manchester speech, in which he sympathizes with the South, because he does not trust the soundness of the North in the cause of freedom!… I am calmly told that it is not for the interest of England that America should be so strong, and it is better for herself, and for us, that she break up! England may have all India, but the United States may not have one Mississippi, or keep the mouth of her own river. I have never felt so unutterably ashamed for my own country, for it affects public men and the press of London on all sides, with exceptions which may be easily counted. Are you not delighted with the progress of India for the better? It appears in the public news in many ways; but besides, I have papers from Oudh and Calcutta which interest me extremely, and give me the most cheerful hopes of the future. The change introduced by the extinction of the Company's rule is prodigiously beyond what I ever dared to expect in so short a time. I am beginning to print (for very limited circulation!) a Latin Robinson Crusoe—chiefly to please a lady-teacher, my favourite pupil. It is not a translation, but an imitation. My wife is just returned from Brighton, where I spent Easter—but did not go to the rifle review. I feel unable to take interest in it, until Secret Diplomacy is abolished. At this moment there is no security that Lord Russell is not intriguing against Hungary, while possessing liberal views for Italy."
It is necessary here, I think, to add that the Hon. East India Company had, so long ago as 1833, been deprived of its commercial privileges; but still its directors practically ruled India under the Board of Control, which Pitt originated. Later, in 1858, Lord Palmerston brought in a bill which was its death-blow. The Company was to be abolished, and the Home Government reigned in its stead in India.
In July, 1863, Newman severed his long connection with University College, and evidently looked forward with great pleasure to uninterrupted time for writing and studying.
"I am finally severed from University College, but do not as yet know how much difference that means, since this is my natural vacation. I suppose that next October I shall begin to realize the greatness of the change for good or evil. (The enclosed photogram makes my face dirty, and one eye too dark; yet seen through a magnifier it is really good.) I seem to have an Augean stable to cleanse in reducing my papers to simplicity, and burning accumulations of thirty years. I am not likely to write less, but perhaps more, in anonymous ways, which impedes one's concentrating oneself on one subject, if that be desirable: as to which I cannot make up my mind. The danger of overworking the brain I see to be extreme if one has one subject and that all paper work and private work.
"I have now got my house, to keep on with right to leave at a quarter of a year's notice."
As the following letters make much mention of the struggle through which the United States was passing, it is perhaps as well to give, briefly, a few details of the happenings which were then taking place.