To the Editor:

I am grateful for Jonathan D. Sarna’s long and thoughtful review of my book, Merchant Princes [Books in Review, March], and thank him for his generous comments that I “paint endlessly fascinating portraits” and present “lively vignettes [that] are well chosen.”

I write to correct one thing and one thing only, which, . . . I believe, is a misimpression your readers might derive from the review. Mr. Sarna states that each of the families I write about “lost control of its empire,” and that the later “generations of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren” have proved “weak, powerless, and morally debauched.” Of some this is true. Of most it is not. In fact, most of the heirs of my generation and later are not the sort of sad ratés Mr. Sarna describes, and I did not say in my book that they were.

Leon Harris
Dallas, Texas

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Jonathan D. Sarna writes:

I have no doubt that most of the heirs of Leon Harris’s generation are fully honorable men. Merchant Princes, however, is not about most of those heirs; it is only about a few of them. If they are unrepresentative, I am hardly to blame.