address you. It may be the discovery of a plot for
your damage, in which the revelator does not care to take the
responsibility of a witness. It may be any one of a thousand things that
mean frankness and delicacy and honor and Christian principle. We have
received anonymous letters which we have put away among our most sacred
archives.

But we suppose every one chiefly associates the idea of anonymous
communications with everything cowardly and base. There are in all
neighborhoods perfidious, sneaking, dastardly, filthy, calumnious,
vermin-infested wretches, spewed up from perdition, whose joy it is to
write letters with fictitious signatures. Sometimes they take the shape of
a valentine, the fourteenth of February being a great outlet for this
obscene spawn. If your nose be long, or your limbs slender, or your waist
thick around, they will be pictorially presented. Sometimes they take the
form of a delicate threat that if you do not thus or so there will be a
funeral at your house, yourself the chief object of interest. Sometimes
they will be denunciatory of your friends. Once being called to preside at
a meeting for the relief of the sewing women of Philadelphia, and having
been called in the opening speech to say something about oppressive
contractors, we received some twenty anonymous letters, the purport of
which was that it would be unsafe for us to go out of doors after dark.
Three months after moving to Brooklyn we preached a sermon reviewing one of
the sins of the city, and anonymous letters came saying that we would not
last six months in the city of churches.

Sometimes the anonymous crime takes the form of a newspaper article; and if
the matter be pursued, the editor-in-chief puts it off on the managing
editor, and the managing editor upon the book critic, and the book critic
upon the reporter.

Whether Adam or Eve or the serpent was the most to be blamed for the
disappearance of the fair apple of reputation is uncertain; the only thing
you can be sure of is that the apple is gone. No honest man will ever write
a thing for a newspaper, in editorial or any other column, that he would be
ashamed to sign with the Christian name that his mother had him baptized
with. They who go skulking about under the editorial "we," unwilling to
acknowledge their identity, are more fit for Delaware whipping-posts than
the position of public educators. It is high time that such hounds were
muzzled.

Let every young man k