he procured its rejection,
and, through legal counsel, served a formal notice upon me not to
publish or to circulate it at all. The second step was to demand from
Dr. Royce a specific retraction and apology; this he contemptuously
refused. The third step was to appeal from the recalcitrant employee
to the responsible employer, and to lay the case respectfully before
the supreme representatives of Harvard University itself. This I now
do, and it is entirely unnecessary to look any farther. But, in order
to lay the case before you fully, it is incumbent upon me to state the
details of these proceedings with some minuteness, and I now proceed
to unfold the extraordinary tale.

VII.

Dr. Royce wound up his ostensible review with these words of bravado
and of challenge: "_We must show no mercy,--as we ask none._" This
fierce flourish of trumpets I understood to be, at least, a fearless
public pledge of a fair hearing in the "Journal of Ethics" of which he
was one of the editors. Moreover, I conceived that a magazine
expressly devoted to ethics would be ashamed not to practise the
ethics which it preached--ashamed not to grant to the accused a
freedom scrupulously made equal to that which it had already granted
to the accuser. Lastly, I was averse to litigation, and desired to use
no coarser weapon, even against a calumniator and libeller, than the
sharp edge of reason itself.

Accordingly, I sought redress in the first instance from the
"International Journal of Ethics." On January 21, I mailed to Mr. S.
Burns Weston, the office editor, an article in reply to Dr. Royce's
ostensible review, together with a letter in which I wrote: "I do not
at all complain of your publishing Dr. Royce's original article,
although it was a most malicious and slanderous one, and undertook
(not to put too fine a point upon it) to post me publicly as a quack.
If you do not deny my indefeasible right to be heard in self-defence
in the same columns, I shall feel that I have no cause whatever to
regard you or your committee as a party to the outrage, and shall
entertain no feelings towards you or towards them other than such as
are perfectly friendly. Let even slander and malice be heard, if truth
shall be as free to reply." Pressing engagements had prevented me from
writing the article in season for the January number of the "Journal
of Ethics," but it was in ample season for the April number.

I sent it at last because I had full confidence