Autograph Letter Signed ('Welby') from Lord Welby [Reginald Earle Welby, Baron Welby] to Col. E. S. E. Childers, regarding his biography of his father the Liberal politician Hugh Culling Eardley Childers, 'the great Colonies' and the British Empire.

4pp., 12mo. Bifolium. With mourning border. Fair, on lightly-aged paper. At the time of writing the biography of the Liberal politician Hugh Culling Eardley Childers (1827-1896) by his son Col. Edmund Spencer Eardley Childers (1854-1919) had just been published, and Welby begins by thanking the Colonel for the gift of the book. 'You may depend on it that there is no one that will value it more than myself - both from my long friendship & connection with him, & emphatically from my high appreciation of his admirable work as a Minister of the Crown in the Public Service [...] Alas how the ideas which Parliament and the Country when he was in his prime have passed away.' It was Childers' efforts which 'really made our relations with the great Colonies what they are. | The critical independence which they granted was a great policy for the Empire & the race, far different from the tinkering views of those who want to sow the seeds of discussion in the Empire by Imperial tariffs & tommy rot of that kind.'