WCP2737

[1]^1,2

The Leeds Mercury

LEEDS.

6th March 1912

Alfred Russel Wallace L.L.D., D.C.L

Dear Sir,

I must thank you very heartily for the kind way in which you have written about my little book 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"³ which I got as a prize for geology at [illeg.] University [2] in 1883 and ^or 1884. In the winter of 1884 I read your "Land Nationalisation"⁴ and Henry Georges' "Progress and Poverty."⁵ 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] 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] 4 despondency and to reprove that timidity which would shrink from enforcing abolish justice even when we know that in order to save humanity every jot and tittle [illeg.] of the laws of God and Nature must be fulfilled. I do certainly feel that in these [illeg.] mutinies of underpaid workers we may discern the tremors of our industrial volcanism which in time will acquire energy to shatter the superencumbent weight [5] 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] 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 Lumsden⁶ [signature]