mnation, or else of clearing my assailed reputation
through direct and open appeal to you. I am no lover of strife, and
least of all do I now seek revenge. I seek only such a vindication of
my good name from unmerited calumny as you, in your own good judgment
and in your own chosen way, are now, I most respectfully submit, bound
in justice to give.

VIII.

To you, therefore, gentlemen of the Corporation and Board of Overseers
of Harvard University, I make with all due deference this public
appeal for redress of a wrong done to me by one of your appointees--a
wrong done, not in his private capacity as an individual (for which,
of course, you would not be justly held responsible), but publicly and
explicitly and emphatically in the name of his "profession," that is,
of his position as a professor in Harvard College. This position is an
official one, due to your appointment; and his scandalous abuse of it
renders him amenable to discipline by you to whom he owes it.
Therefore, I now formally appeal to you for redress of these specific
wrongs, committed by Assistant Professor Josiah Royce in flagrant
violation of my rights as a citizen and as a man:--

I. He has published against me, in the "International Journal of
Ethics," a libel which is as wanton and unprovoked as it is malicious
and false, and for which no motive is even conceivable except mere
professional jealousy or rivalry in authorship.

II. He has sought to give credibility and respectability to this false
and libellous publication by invoking the authority, not of reason or
truth, but of his mere "professional" position as professor in Harvard
University, thereby artfully suggesting and insinuating to the
uninformed public that Harvard University sustains him in his attack;
whereas, in conferring upon me the degree of doctor of philosophy and
in committing to me formerly the conduct of an advanced course of
philosophical instruction, Harvard University has given emphatic
testimony to the contrary.

III. Repudiating his bold promise to "ask no mercy," he has sought,
with incredible cowardice and meanness, to deprive me of all
opportunity of being heard in self-defence, _first_, by excluding from
the "International Journal of Ethics" my perfectly reasonable reply to
what he himself confesses to have been an "intentionally severe
attack," and, _secondly_, by threatening me through his counsel with
legal prosecution, if I publish it anywhere else or circula