On the failure of Dr. Royce's very injudicious attempt at dictation, Dr. Adler found himself compelled to assume the editorial power and responsibility, which he ought to have assumed and exercised in the first instance by refusing publication to Dr. Royce's original libel. But, yielding to Dr. Royce's influence, he took the same position, and still tried to shield the libeller from the just and lawful consequences of his libel. No principle is more firmly established in the public conscience, as interpreted by the common law, than that the fact of an attack by A involves the right of self-defence by B. Whoever, therefore, has permitted an attack which he might have prevented is bound to permit the self-defence, also; and Dr. Adler, having granted to Dr. Royce the freedom of libelling me, was bound to grant to me the equal freedom of defending myself against the libel. But this equal freedom Dr. Adler denied. After some fruitless correspondence, I wrote to him on May 4 as follows: "I require the freedom, not of 'parliament,' but of the courts--freedom to present my 'facts,' and no less to draw my 'inferences'--freedom to array my evidence, and no less to make my pleading. By publishing his new libel, you estop yourself from denying me this freedom. If you do deny it, I withdraw altogether and seek justice and redress elsewhere. I ask only what is self-evidently fair: (1) equal space with Dr. Royce, (2) equal freedom with Dr. Royce, (3) no further rejoinders by Dr. Royce, and (4) no editorial mention of the matter at all from the 'Journal' itself." To this letter Dr. Adler merely telegraphed his final reply on May 6 in these brief terms: "Regret your insistence on freedom of courts--parliamentary freedom open to you." This ended the matter, so far as the "Journal of Ethics" was concerned, in Dr. Adler's explicit denial of a full and fair hearing in its columns to a party calumniated and libelled by one of his own contributors and a member of his own "editorial committee." Negotiations, it is true, for the publication of my reply in the July number were a little later re-opened by Dr. Adler, on receiving advice from a legal friend of his own that to publish it would be his wisest course; but he himself broke them off on a trivial pretext, after receiving contrary advice from Dr. Royce's counsel, together with a copy of the legal protest sent to me personally. Thus Dr. Royce himself, recalling his original consent, procured the final rejection by the "Journal of Ethics" of my reply to his own attack. On June 19, I was notified that the July number had been made up without it.