A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University Professor Royce\'s Libel
_Gentlemen_,--Believing it to be a necessary part of good citizenship to defend one's reputation against unjustifiable attacks, and believing you to have been unwarrantably, but not remotely, implicated in an unjustifiable attack upon my own reputation by Assistant Professor Josiah Royce, since his attack is made publicly, explicitly, and emphatically on the authority of his "professional" position as one of your agents and appointees, I respectfully apply to you for redress of the wrong, leaving it wholly to your own wisdom and sense of justice to decide what form such redress should take. If Dr. Royce had not, by clear and undeniable implication, appealed to your high sanction to sustain him in his attack,--if he had not undeniably sought to create a widespread but false public impression that, in making this attack, he spoke, and had a right to speak, with all the prestige and authority of Harvard University itself,--I should not have deemed it either necessary or becoming to appeal to you in self-defence, or, indeed, to take any public notice whatever of an attack otherwise unworthy of it. But under the circumstances I am confident that you will at once recognize the inevitableness and unquestionable propriety of my appeal from the employee to the employer, from the agent to the principal; and it would be disrespectful to you to doubt for a moment that, disapproving of an
their office almost caressingly, she anticipated and met every want
of the invalid.
As light began again to dawn upon the mind of Mrs. Linden, she could
not but notice the sweet-faced, gentle, assiduous stranger who had
become her nurse. Her first feeling was one of gratitude, blended
with affection. Never before had any one been so devoted to her;
never before had any one appeared to regard her with such a real
wish to do her good.
"What is your name, my dear?" she asked one day, in a feeble voice,
looking up into her face.
A warm flush came over the cheeks of Ellen; her eyes dropped to the
floor. She hesitated for several moments; then she replied in a low
voice--"Ellen."
Mrs. Linden looked at her earnestly, but said nothing in reply.
"Who is this nurse you have been so kind to procure for me?" Mrs.
Linden said to her friend, a few days subsequently. She had gained
much in a short time.
"She is a stranger to me. I never saw her before she came and said
that she had heard that there was a sick lady here who wished a
nurse."
_Gentlemen_,--Believing it to be a necessary part of good citizenship to defend one's reputation against unjustifiable attacks, and believing you to have been unwarrantably, but not remotely, implicated in an unjustifiable attack upon my own reputation by Assistant Professor Josiah Royce, since his attack is made publicly, explicitly, and emphatically on the authority of his "professional" position as one of your agents and appointees, I respectfully apply to you for redress of the wrong, leaving it wholly to your own wisdom and sense of justice to decide what form such redress should take. If Dr. Royce had not, by clear and undeniable implication, appealed to your high sanction to sustain him in his attack,--if he had not undeniably sought to create a widespread but false public impression that, in making this attack, he spoke, and had a right to speak, with all the prestige and authority of Harvard University itself,--I should not have deemed it either necessary or becoming to appeal to you in self-defence, or, indeed, to take any public notice whatever of an attack otherwise unworthy of it. But under the circumstances I am confident that you will at once recognize the inevitableness and unquestionable propriety of my appeal from the employee to the employer, from the agent to the principal; and it would be disrespectful to you to doubt for a moment that, disapproving of an