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

骨
A Public Appeal for Redress to the?by Francis Ellingwood Abbot

The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Public Appeal for Redress to the
Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University, by Francis Ellingwood Abbot This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PUBLIC APPEAL FOR REDRESS ***

Produced by Curtis Weyant, Diane Monico, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by Case Western Reserve University Preservation Department Digital Library.)

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 disguised by a few exaggerated compliments adroitly inserted here and there: these merely furnish the foil needed to give greater potency and efficiency to the personal insinuations, and, like