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 Overseersof Harvard University:
Gentlemen,—Believing it to be a necessary part of goodcitizenship to defend one's reputation against unjustifiableattacks, and believing you to have been unwarrantably, butnot remotely, implicated in an unjustifiable attack upon myown reputation by Assistant Professor Josiah Royce, sincehis attack is made publicly, explicitly, and emphatically onthe authority of his "professional" position as one of youragents and appointees, I respectfully apply to you for redressof the wrong, leaving it wholly to your own wisdom andsense of justice to decide what form such redress shouldtake. If Dr. Royce had not, by clear and undeniable implication,appealed to your high sanction to sustain him in hisattack,—if he had not undeniably sought to create a widespreadbut false public impression that, in making this attack,he spoke, and had a right to speak, with all the prestige andauthority of Harvard University itself,—I should not havedeemed it either necessary or becoming to appeal to you inself-defence, or, indeed, to take any public notice whateverof an attack otherwise unworthy of it. But under the circumstancesI am confident that you will at once recognizethe inevitableness and unquestionable propriety of my appealfrom the employee to the employer, from the agent to theprincipal; and it would be disrespectful to you to doubt fora moment that, disapproving of an attack made impliedlyand yet unwarrantably in your name, you will express yourdisapprobation in some just and appropriate manner. Myaction in thus laying the matter publicly before you caninflict no possible injury upon our honored and revered[Pg 4]Alma Mater: injury to her is not even conceivable, excepton the wildly improbable supposition of your being indifferentto a scandalous abuse of his position by one of yourassistant professors, who, with no imaginable motive otherthan mere professional jealousy or rivalry of authorship, hasgone to the unheard-of length of "professionally warningthe public" against a peaceable and inoffensive privatescholar, whose published arguments he has twice tried, buttwice signally failed, to meet in an intellectual way. If thepublic at large should have reason to believe that conductso scandalous as this in a Harvard professor will not be condemnedby you, as incompatible with the dignity and thedecencies of his office and with the rights of private citizensin general, Harvard University would indeed suffer, andought to suffer; but it is wholly within your power to preventthe growth of so injurious a belief. I beg leave, therefore,to submit to you the following statement, and to solicitfor it the patient and impartial consideration which thegravity of the case requires.
I.
The first number of a new quarterly periodical, the "InternationalJournal of Ethics," published at Philadelphia inOctober, 1890, contained an ostensible review by Dr. Royceof my last book, "The Way out of Agnosticism." I advisedlyuse the word "ostensible," because the main purportand intention of the article were not at all to criticise a