ANONYMOUS LETTERS.
In boyhood days we were impressed with the fertility of a certain author
whose name so often appeared in the spelling books and readers, styled
Anon. He seemed to write more than Isaac Watts, or Shakespeare, or Blair.
In the index, and scattered throughout all our books, was the name of Anon.
He appeared in all styles of poetry and prose and dialogue. We wondered
where he lived, what his age was, and how he looked, it was not until quite
late in boyhood that we learned that Anon was an abbreviation for
anonymous, and that he was sometimes the best saint and at other times the
most extraordinary villain.
After centuries of correspondence old Anonymous is as fertile of thought
and brain and stratagem as ever, and will probably keep on writing till the
last fire burns up his pen and cracks to pieces his ink bottle. Anonymous
letters sometimes have a mission of kindness and gratitude and good cheer.
Genuine modesty may sometimes hide the name of an epistolary author or
authoress. It may be a "God bless you" from some one who thinks herself
hardly in a position to 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 know that when he is tempted to pen anything which
requires him to disguise his handwriting he is in fearful danger. You
despoil your own nature by such procedure more than you can damage any one
else. Bowie-knife and dagger are more honorable than an anonymous pen
sharpened for defamation of character. Better try putting strychnine in the
flour barrel. Better mix ratsbane in the jelly cake. That behavior would be
more elegant and Christian.
After much observation we have fixed upon this plan: If any one writes us
in defamation of another, we adopt the opposite theory. If the letter says
that the assaulted one lies, we take it as eulogistic of his veracity; or
that he is unchaste, we set him down as pure; or fraudulent, we are seized
with a desire to make him our executor. We do so on logical and
unmistakable grounds. A defamatory letter is from the devil or his
satellites. The devil hates only the good. The devil hates Mr. A; ergo, Mr.
A is good.
Much of the work of the day of judgment will be with the authors of
anonymous letters. The majority of other crimes against society were found
out, but these creatures so disguised their handwriting in the main text of
the letter, or so willfully misspelled the direction on the envelope, and
put it in such a distant post-office, and looked so innocent when you met
them, that it shall be for the most part a dead secret till the books are
opened; and when that is done, we do not think these abandoned souls will
wait to have their condemnation read, but, ashamed to meet the
announcement, will leap pell-mell into the pit, crying, "We wrote them."
If, since the world stood, there have been composed and sent off by mail or
private postmen 1,600,378 anonymous letters derogatory of character, then
1,600,378 were vicious and damnable. If you are compelled to choose between
writing a letter with false signature vitriolic of any man's integrity or
any woman's honor on the one hand, and the writing a letter with a red-hot
nail dipped in adder's poison on a sheet woven of leper scales, choose the
latter. It were healthier, nobler, and could better endure the test of
man's review and God's scrutiny.