Excerpt from Banquet at Delmonico's by Barry Werth, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Spencer held that societies are organisms and that, like living forms, they evolve. He asserted a gradual evolution from primitive, less organized, to advanced, more organized, societies; and he maintained that as societies become more complex, and individual roles (and property) more varied, government must retreat from vast areas of social life so as to allow each individual to rise by his own exertions. Noting that Spencer compared the role of Parliament to that of the "cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal," Huxley applauded Spencer for the biological analogy, but criticized his conclusion that just as the brain "averages the interests of life, physical, intellectual, moral, social," the appropriate sphere of government is to average the interests of various classes in society, not to do anything to improve or alter their relations. Huxley wrote:

All this appears to be very just. But if the resemblance between the body physiological and body politic are any indication, not only of what the latter is, but of what it ought to be, and what it is tending to become, I cannot but think that the real force of the analogy is totally opposed to the negative view of State function.

Suppose that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction, except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had the right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell left free to follow its own "interest," and laissez-faire lord of all, what would become of the body physiological?

In Paris, Spencer bristled for three days while Youmans coped with "my embarrassments here - short time, nobody at home, difficulty of interpretation, torments with cab-drivers, etc." Spencer sought unsuccessfully, in scrambled French, to find a secretary, until one night Youmans finally offered to take dictation. "Spencer couldn’t stand it," Youmans told Catherine in a letter, "so he said, ‘Huxley has been rampaging around long enough; he must be pulled up.’ I wrote twenty pages of manuscript." Polishing the reply upon his return to London, Spencer pushed to have it appear in the next Fortnightly Review, explaining his urgency in his autobiography: "[Huxley] put his objection in the form of a question. I could scarcely avoid giving an answer; for otherwise the implication would have been that the question was unanswerable."

While Spencer settled scores, Youmans traveled by train to Cologne, then to Berlin, birthplace and capital of the triumphal new German empire. Increasingly confident that the international series would get off the ground - he had English and French publishers in tow, and a roster of famous authors including ten of the "ablest men in France," as well as Spencer, who succumbed to Youmans’s pressure to write a short extra book on sociology - he nonetheless encountered strong opposition at first to the scheme. "Germany is not going to suit me," he cautioned Catherine, who assisted him in business, a well-regarded scientific author in her own right:

They are too cocky. "We don’t want your translations; we can make our own books; the talent is here," is the way the publishers talk. On the ot

Excerpted from Banquet at Delmonico's by Barry Werth. Copyright © 2009 by Barry Werth. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.