WCP617

[1]

THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY

23 BRIDE LANE

FLEET STREET

LONDON E.C.

25th. January. 1909.

Dear Dr. Russel Wallace,

I was very much tempted on Friday night to speak to you at the Royal Institution, of which I have been for some time a member, which I frequent pretty regularly. I felt that the strain of delivering your lecture must have been very great upon you and many people desired to speak to you. I was very sorry that you had to cut the latter part of your lecture. Is it to be published anywhere? I would like very much to know what you are ^were to say on the theoretical points, which were foreshadowed in the first part. If you are not going to publish it in full, would you let me consider it for the Socialist Review?? It does not exactly come within the scope of the Review, but the Review is being sold in a constituency which is very largely scientific, and which would appreciate very much a statement on the lines which I think you have prepared, but which you could not give us on Friday

[2] I have felt very sorry that an unusual pressure of political work necessitated by a score of different things, which I daresay you can very well imagine, has made it quite impossible for me to write the article I wanted to write upon your two valuable papers on the Unemployed which published last year. I have, however, been doing my best in the course of several speeches I have delivered to draw the attention of my audience to your proposals, because, on the whole, I agree with your line of approach. There may be one or two details that I should prefer to settle otherwise than you propose, but they are very minor. The self-sufficing industrial community is ^was the great improvement ^aim that we have to placed before us in our Unemployed Workmen’s Bill.

I hope you are none the worse for your Friday’s effort, which was really very inspiring to a good many of us who were present.

Yours very sincerely | J. Ramsay MacDonald [signature]