WCP2737

[1]

The Leeds Mercury

Leeds

6th March 1912

Alfred Russel Wallace LL.D, <S.C.L?>

Dear Sir,

I must thanks you very heartily for the kind way in which you have written about my little books on the Land Question. To explain how much I appreciate your letter I would need to enter into a long story beginning with the happiness I felt in reading your "Island Life" which I <got> as a prize for Geology at <Sheridan?> University [2] in 1883 or1884. In the winter of 1884 I read your "Land Nationalisation" and Henry Georges' "Progress and Poverty."¹ I could not tell you what your many & varied books have been to me, but so great a place have your writings had in my regard all these years that the commendation of no other man could have filled me with such pride and pleasure.

I do not at all dissent from your contention that on the death of landholders their land should revert to the nation. For many years [3] I have held that in that way ample justice would be done to them. But I am not hopeful of convincing our people of a moral truth so contrary to their prejudices, or of persuading our politicians to address themselves to a task so difficult. Like many others I have of late years suffered from a waning faith in human progress, but events like the Railwaymen's & the miners' strikes should be a lesson to cure us of [4] despondency and to reprove that timidity which would shrink from [illeg.] <abolish?> <justice?> even when we know that in order to save humanity every jot and tittle of the laws of God and Nature must be fulfilled. I do certainly feel that in these past mutinies of underpaid workers we may discern the tremors of the industrial volcanism which in time will acquire energy to shatter the superencumbent weight [5] of capitalism.

Your letter will encourage me to go on with the tasks that lie to my hand & write with industry. In <journalism> a man is always being tempted to turn from the straight and narrow path of truth-worship for the pleasure gardens of profit and popularity.

Might I request permission to publish your letter[?] It would [6] give me great pleasure, and would I am sure powerfully inspire the appeal we wish to make to the Government and to the nation.

Again thanking you, believe me | Yours most Sincerely

James Lumsden [signature]²