Dr. Royce wound up his ostensible review with these words of bravado and of challenge: "_We must show no mercy,--as we ask none._" This fierce flourish of trumpets I understood to be, at least, a fearless public pledge of a fair hearing in the "Journal of Ethics" of which he was one of the editors. Moreover, I conceived that a magazine expressly devoted to ethics would be ashamed not to practise the ethics which it preached--ashamed not to grant to the accused a freedom scrupulously made equal to that which it had already granted to the accuser. Lastly, I was averse to litigation, and desired to use no coarser weapon, even against a calumniator and libeller, than the sharp edge of reason itself. Accordingly, I sought redress in the first instance from the "International Journal of Ethics." On January 21, I mailed to Mr. S. Burns Weston, the office editor, an article in reply to Dr. Royce's ostensible review, together with a letter in which I wrote: "I do not at all complain of your publishing Dr. Royce's original article, although it was a most malicious and slanderous one, and undertook (not to put too fine a point upon it) to post me publicly as a quack. If you do not deny my indefeasible right to be heard in self-defence in the same columns, I shall feel that I have no cause whatever to regard you or your committee as a party to the outrage, and shall entertain no feelings towards you or towards them other than such as are perfectly friendly. Let even slander and malice be heard, if truth shall be as free to reply." Pressing engagements had prevented me from writing the article in season for the January number of the "Journal of Ethics," but it was in ample season for the April number. I sent it at last because I had full confidence in the soundness of what Thomas Jefferson said so well: "Truth and reason can maintain themselves without the aid of coercion, if left free to defend themselves. But then they must defend themselves. Eternal lies and sophisms on one side, and silence on the other, are too unequal."