Autograph letter signed : Mount Stuart, to William Angus Knight, 1893 August 11.

Enclosing letters and a book and discussing the issue of illegitimacy; saying "I do not myself agree in the weight which many seem to attach to the statistics of illegitimacy, because illegitimate birth argues the absence of evils such as venal prostitution, devices to prevent conception, and the procuration of abortion which are much worse than simple fornication - and my belief is that the proportion of Irish Catholics among the prostitutes of Glasgow, Liverpool, and Cardiff or Bristol, is much larger than that of Scottish, English, or Welsh Protestants among those of Belfast, Dublin, and Cork. Personally, I can answer any question you like when we meet - and I will now only say that when any one among Catholics has been going wrong, the first thing which is done is to endeavour to get him or her to go to confession as the best step towards setting right again; and I should, in the majority of cases, feel a good deal of suspicion as to the moral condition (using 'moral' in its widest sense) of anyone whom I found had not been to confession at least at the last Easter period;" discussing, at length, issues surrounding the union of Dundee and St. Andrew's; referring to the Pfeiffer Trust and other potential sources of long-term funding; commenting "...wealth is an incentive to desire of appropriation, especially when combined with facility of acquisition - There is a school of thought which has little regard for the intentions of benefactors - 'The dead hand' said one of them 'has held it [the property[ long enough' - and it is well to consider what might be done by an Act of Parliament promoted by an alien and hostile majority in the Senatus and in the Univ. Court, goaded by the frantic instinct of seizing, of absorbing, of destroying anything, in order to give another chance of life to an institution from which individuals profit but which facts have inexorably doomed to extinction - Dundee Coll. is bound to perish unless it is transferred to StA, which would be its best chance (I doubt if it could exist even as a 'night-school', the term applied to it, I believe by its pupils, where it is) but St. K's and everything at StA are in the most imminent danger of destruction for the purpose of prolonging it's last agonies by a transfusion of their strong blood into it's almost still-born veins."