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
from his accolade with a face more glorified than Millicent's when she
silently dedicated herself to the shining company of those who keep
unsullied the early vision.
As she passed out of the hall, her eyes fell again upon the painting
of the Temptation. She read the black and gilt legend below it--"And
Angels Came and Ministered Unto Him." Then she laughed down upon the
old-fashioned figure trotting by her side. "And angels came," she
said.
Her rapt look frightened Anna when the automobile returned for her.
Then the heart of that frivolous woman was stricken for a moment with
wistfulness.
"You seem very happy," she faltered, "and--amused, is it? What are you
smiling over?"
"I am still thinking of angels. Would you ever have dreamed, Anna,
that they sometimes wore list shoes, and sometimes ate bread and jam,
and occasionally spoke with granite lips? They do."
Brockton stirred uneasily, foreboding failure. And Anna sighed,
mourning two lost visions.
_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