BR TO LUCY M. DONNELLY, 9 MAR. 1911
BRACERS 58508. ALS. McMaster
Edited by M. Forte. Proofread by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
Trinity College,
Cambridge.1
March 9. 1911

My dear Lucy

Many thanks for your letter. Yes, I was very tired when I last wrote, but I have done hardly any work beyond my lectures this term, and I am consequently rested now. The only other work (to be called work) that I have done is to write a paper for the Aristotelian Society and to prepare 3 lectures to be given in Paris in the Vacation. I have to work in Vacation time now, as the interruptions are so numerous in term-time that original work is almost impossible. This term my time has been very much taken up with founding a Cambridge branch of the People’s Suffrage Federation. It is going well, but wants a lot of working up. We had a meeting at which Janet Case and I spoke, and since then I have been beating up all the people of any importance who favour Adult Suffrage. It is interesting and pleasant work.

I am very glad indeed to hear that you are so well and rested — it is excellent news. I shall enjoy looking over 10 or 20 Culture Papers from Bryn Mawr — it will be a real interest to me to compare them with the Trinity papers I looked over last year. It is quite impossible they should be worse than many of those, and unlikely that they will be better than the best, which were very good. Here, the level was very much higher in philosophy and science than in culture. Let me know what sort of report you want. Do you want Order of Merit, general comments on the state of their minds and education, detailed criticism, or what precisely? I can give you any sort of comment you like with very little trouble beyond that of reading the papers, and I shall enjoy it. Have the papers sent here please.

I am very sorry to hear that you won’t get abroad this summer — I had much hoped you would. However, you know what is best for you to do, so I submit.

Yes, our politics are interesting, but the reciprocity treaty has been quite as interesting as anything that is happening here. I should have thought things were moving in America quite as much as here.

I don’t know what book of Karl Pearson’s you are reading. I think he is a crank, with very fair brains but no judgment. He seems to me wrong in his controversy with Mendelians, rather absurd in his Grammar of Science (where he says there are only sensations, and yet believes in the existence of the brain), and on rather a wrong track in his mathematical work on Statistics. His recent investigation of the children of drunkards seemed to me full of fallacies.

I was interrupted by a number of Adult Suffragists, who gradually gave place to metaphysicians; it is now 1.30 a.m. so I must go to bed. Goodbye, and write again as soon as you can.

Yrs affectionately
Bertrand Russell.

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