In January, 1886, I was invited to dine with Laura Curtis Bullard, to meet Mme. Durand (Henri Greville), the novelist.  She seemed a politic rather than an earnest woman of principle.  As it was often very inconvenient for me to entertain distinguished visitors, who desired to meet me in my country home during the winter, Mrs. Bullard generously offered always to invite them to her home.  She and her good mother have done their part in the reform movements in New York by their generous hospitalities.

Reading the debates in Congress, at that time, on a proposed appropriation for a monument to General Grant, I was glad to see that Senator Plumb of Kansas was brave enough to express his opinion against it.  I fully agree with him.  So long as multitudes of our people who are doing the work of the world live in garrets and cellars, in ignorance, poverty, and vice, it is the duty of Congress to apply the surplus in the national treasury to objects which will feed, clothe, shelter, and educate these wards of the State.  If we must keep on continually building monuments to great men, they should be handsome blocks of comfortable homes for the poor, such as Peabody built in London.  Senator Hoar of Massachusetts favored the Grant monument, partly to cultivate the artistic tastes of our people.  We might as well cultivate our tastes on useful dwellings as on useless monuments.  Surely sanitary homes and schoolhouses for the living would be more appropriate monuments to wise statesmen than the purest Parian shafts among the sepulchers of the dead.

The strikes and mobs and settled discontent of the masses warn us that, although we forget and neglect their interests and our duties, we do it at the peril of all.  English statesmen are at their wits’ end to-day with their tangled social and industrial problems, threatening the throne of a long line of kings.  The impending danger cannot be averted by any surface measures; there must be a radical change in the relations of capital and labor.

In April rumors of a domestic invasion, wafted on every Atlantic breeze, warned us that our children were coming from England and France—­a party of six.  Fortunately, the last line of the History was written, so Miss Anthony, with vol.  III. and bushels of manuscripts, fled to the peaceful home of her sister Mary at Rochester.  The expected party sailed from Liverpool the 26th of May, on the America After being out three days the piston rod broke and they were obliged to return.  My son-in-law, W.H.  Blatch, was so seasick and disgusted that he remained in England, and took a fresh start two months later, and had a swift passage without any accidents.  The rest were transferred to the Germanic, and reached New York the 12th of June.  Different divisions of the party were arriving until midnight.  Five people and twenty pieces of baggage!  The confusion of such an invasion quite upset the even tenor of our days, and it took some time for people and trunks to find their respective niches.  However crowded elsewhere, there was plenty of room in our hearts, and we were unspeakably happy to have our flock all around us once more.