Chapter 40

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.