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.