A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University

A Public Appeal for Redress to
the
by Francis Ellingwood
Abbot

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Title: A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of
Harvard University Professor Royce's Libel
Author: Francis Ellingwood Abbot
Release Date: November 12, 2006 [EBook #19768]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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APPEAL FOR REDRESS ***

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PROFESSOR ROYCE'S LIBEL.
* * * * *
A
PUBLIC APPEAL FOR REDRESS
TO THE
CORPORATION AND OVERSEERS
OF
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
BY
FRANCIS ELLINGWOOD ABBOT, PH.D.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
* * * * *
BOSTON, MASS.
GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET, 1891.

PUBLIC APPEAL.
TO THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS AND BOARD OF
OVERSEERS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY:
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
attack made impliedly and yet unwarrantably in your name, you will
express your disapprobation in some just and appropriate manner. My
action in thus laying the matter publicly before you can inflict no
possible injury upon our honored and revered Alma Mater: injury to
her is not even conceivable, except on the wildly improbable
supposition of your being indifferent to a scandalous abuse of his
position by one of your assistant professors, who, with no imaginable
motive other than mere professional jealousy or rivalry of authorship,
has gone to the unheard-of length of "professionally warning the
public" against a peaceable and inoffensive private scholar, whose
published arguments he has twice tried, but twice signally failed, to
meet in an intellectual way. If the public at large should have reason to
believe that conduct so scandalous as this in a Harvard professor will
not be condemned by you, as incompatible with the dignity and the
decencies of his office and with the rights of private citizens in general,
Harvard University would indeed suffer, and ought to suffer; but it is
wholly within your power to prevent the growth of so injurious a belief.
I beg leave, therefore, to submit to you the following statement, and to

solicit for it the patient and impartial consideration which the gravity of
the case requires.
I.
The first number of a new quarterly periodical, the "International
Journal of Ethics," published at Philadelphia in October, 1890,
contained an ostensible review by Dr. Royce of my last book, "The
Way out of Agnosticism." I advisedly use the word "ostensible,"
because the main purport and intention of the article were not at all to
criticise a philosophy, but to sully the reputation of the philosopher,
deprive him of public confidence, ridicule and misrepresent his labors,
hold him up by name to public obloquy and contempt, destroy or lessen
the circulation of his books, and, in general, to blacken and break down
his literary reputation by any and every means, even to the extent of
aspersing his personal reputation, although there had never been the
slightest personal collision. Its bitter and invidious spirit was not in the
least