rstition call _us_ the
hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time;
very well, if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I
will not so undignify myself as to follow them. I cannot call them harsh
names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting my
disapproval; and this without malice, without venom.

To resume. What I was about to say, was, those thugs have built their
entire superstition upon _inferences_, not upon known and established
facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to be able to say
our side never resorts to it while there is anything else to resort to.

But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of that
sort.

Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the Works, we infer
that somebody did. Who was it, then? This requires some more inferring.

Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a tidal
wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of admiration, delight
and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up and claim the authorship.
Why a dozen, instead of only one or two? One reason is, because there's
a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that poem. Do you remember
"Beautiful Snow"? Do you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to
Sleep"? Do you remember "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight!
Make me a child again just for to-night"? I remember them very well.
Their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who were
alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible argument in his
favor, at least: to wit, he could have done the authoring; he was
competent.

Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't. There was good
reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time
who was competent--not a dozen, and not two. A long time ago the
dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of
prodigious footprints stretching across the plain--footprints that were
three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong
deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any
doubt as to who had made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen
claimants? Were there two? No--the people knew who it was that had been
along there: there was only one Hercules.

There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn't be two; certainly
there couldn't be two at the same time