invitation, he came to lecture in the United States and made himself
personally known to his many readers, it was this widespread response to
his influence which made his welcome comparable, as was said at the
time, to a royal progress.

His own interest in the present problems of the country and the
possibilities of its future was always keen, not merely as touching the
development of a vast political force--one of the dominant factors of
the near future--but far more as touching the character of its
approaching greatness. Huge territories and vast resources were of small
interest to him in comparison with the use to which they should be put.
None felt more vividly than he that the true greatness of a nation would
depend upon the spirit of the principles it adopted, upon the character
of the individuals who make up the nation and shape the channels in
which the currents of its being will hereafter flow.

This was the note he struck in the appeal for intellectual sincerity and
clearness which he made at the end of his New York "Lectures on
Evolution." The same note dominates that letter to his sister--a
Southerner by adoption--which gives his reading of the real issue at
stake in the great civil war. Slavery is bad for the slave, but far
worse for the master, as sapping his character and making impossible
that moral vigour of the individual on which is based the collective
vigour of the nation.

The interest with which he followed the later development of social
problems need not be dwelt on here, except to say that he watched their
earlier maturity in America as an indication of the problems which would
afterwards call for a solution in his own country. His share in treating
them was limited to examining the principles of social philosophy on