From Leonard Darwin to H. E. Litchfield 6 November [1875]

Dear Retta

I have just got your long letter by P and O. I am afraid you have had rather a dismal summer holidays, and Richard will feel rather flat having to go back to work again without a regular change. Abinger ought to have been looking beautiful, if the weather had been kind to you; to my mind there is nothing so beautiful in the world as a fine autumn day in England— at least for a standing dish. This place might have been so beautiful if providence had kindly given it a few more feet of earth over the rocks. All the best gardens have to have earth brought them and in the country round the inhabitants build inummerable stone walls to keep the earth from being washed away in the heavy rains, of which we have had a good deal lately. I used to imagine that Malta was a place of perpetual blue skies, but it is far from that and at times the weather is more uncertain than in England.

This is rather an unhappy country as far as I can see; in the first place I believe there are few places in the world where the priests are in greater numbers or more absolutely powerful. Then the population is more dense here than in any country in the world—this is absolutely a fact—and the people cannot be induced to emigrate. The result is that labour is excessively cheap— a common labourer getting $\frac{1}{2}$ a day, which cannot mean more than 6/- a week all the year round as these creatures are not allowed to work on festas. Then the education is entirely in the hands of the priests and is at a standstill, and no one sees how to improve it. Maltese is as far as I can learn an unwritten language, and so they have to first teach the children some foreign language, probably as different from their own as chinese from English  The priests decide that the language should be italian, but there is a party that would like to have English instead, and if we are to keep Malta, it would probably would be better than italian; but Arabic would in most ways be the best of all, as Maltese is only a very corrupt arabic; the priest would never allow it to be taught as it would give them a heathen literature. It is wretched seeing these hundreds of idle priests and monks, when the people are so poor, and I am sure that many of the governors here must have been tempted to become Bismarks, and are only restrained by the promises the English gave when taking over the island  There is one most objectionable habit here; people pay the priests to be allowed to ring the bells, as it is supposed to sanctify them; the noise is terrible when there are four or five bells and each ringist is trying to get his money's worth.

I have just had the misfortune of being elected to the Mess Committee and they wanted to make me secretary but that I kicked against as I have quite enough to do without it. I have been dining out rather often in the last few days; all our own married people always ask a new comer to dinner, and in this way one soon gets to know a lot of people. Tell them at home that I am still alive, as I have not had go enough to write another letter.

Your affec brother | Leonard Darwin