"I would not have you take any particular trouble about it, but if in your Turkish Dictionary you find (this) to mean tax, at your entire leisure (no hurry at all) I should be glad to learn how to pronounce the word.
"I received on Saturday from Washington a newspaper which contains very interesting news from North Carolina and Alabama. N. C. comes out 'square' for the Republican party, and Alabama avows Republican sentiments. Both accept negro suffrage and absolute equality of the races. Coloured orators are prominent and acceptable.
"I also have a very interesting letter from a coloured gentleman from New Orleans, saying that the last acts of Congress have quite quelled the reign of terror, and brought out the White Unionists, who did not dare to speak before; and they are much more numerous than he had believed. Although Congress has been pusillanimous in the extreme, and always deficient, both as to time and substance, and although the danger of reaction is not past, still everything is turning for the better since the last act of the thirty-ninth Congress and first of the fortieth, and I think we may now hope that the Unionists of the South, white and black, will be able to fight their own battles. In England I do not think our agitation can be appeased by the Reform Bill of this Parliament….
"Ever yours cordially,
"F. W. Newman."
The following letter concerns Vaccination almost entirely. Newman's views with respect to vaccination were very clearly set forth in Vol. III of his Miscellanies. They come under the heading of an article called "Barbarisms of Civilisation." [Footnote: Published in the Contemporary Review of June, 1879.] Newman owns to having no medical knowledge of the risks or non-risks of vaccination, but from what he considers to be the rational point of view he objects to it most strongly. He protests that Government Vaccinators have "for many years obtained a large part of what they called lymph … (pus, or matter, is the only right word) by inoculating calves or bullocks with small-pox. The result in the animals they are pleased to call cow-pox, and when the poisonous matter is transferred back to human infants they assume that it will not produce small-pox! But while the doctrine is orthodox in London, the Local Government in Dublin allows no such dealing."
He adds: "Unless the causes of small-pox be removed (generally some impurity in the air or in the food), those causes will work mischief somehow. throw an eruptive disease back into the system is proverbially dangerous…. Moreover, what right has any physician to neglect the cures of small-pox, by which herbalists, hydropaths, and Turkish-bath keepers find it a most tractable disease?"
In a letter called "Compulsory Vaccination," published in 1884, he says: "To obviate it" (small-pox) "by extirpating its causes is good sense; to infuse a new disease without caring to extirpate the causes of the existing disease is a want of common sense." In the letter following, the "Harry" (Dr. Henry) is the boy who boarded with the Newmans, and left snail-shells stuck on a board when he left! He was well known in the world of science as Professor H. Alleyne Nicholson, of Aberdeen.
There is no date or address on this letter.
"My dear Nicholson,