To Charles Augustus Strong
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
Polstreath,Megairssey,
Cornwall, England. Jan. 13, 1917
I wish I could talk with you about the war and the glimmerings of peace: apart from Boylston Beal . . . I am still pursued by the fatality of having only radical or pro-German friends, and it tries my patience sorely. Why will clever people be so frivolous, captious, and pert-minded? Hooker said “nothing is so malapert as a splenetic religion”, but nothing makes me so splenetic as a malapert judgment in politics. After all, religion is congenitally the sphere of fancy and passion: but people ought to be serious in their views of this world. Don’t you think the Allies have made most happy replies to the German and the American notes?
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.