You who discuss politics and decide affairs, are you not continually accusing each other of sophistry, inconsistency, and shying away from the point?  Take up any political or religious newspaper, and see, if any faith is to be put in testimony, how deficient in logic are all these logic-mongers,—­how all the learned and logical are accused by other learned and logical of false assumptions, of invalid reasoning, of foregone conclusions, of pride and prejudice and passion.  One would say that the result of your profound researches was only to make you more intensely illogical than you could otherwise be.

    “As skilful divers to the bottom fall
    Swifter than they who cannot swim at all,
    So in the sea of sophisms, to my thinking. 
    You have a strange alacrity in sinking.”

(Ego et Dorset fecimus!)

Sure I am my humble ability in the way of unreason can never compass fallacies so stupendous as those which you attribute to each other; and if this is all the result of your logic, I will none of it, initialed to possess at least the advantage, that, when I write nonsense, I know it is nonsense, while you write it and think it sense.  But your thinking so does not make it so, and you need not rule me out of court on the strength of it.  I acknowledge, in the domain of letters, none but Squatter Sovereignty.  In literature, unlike morals, might makes right.  If I think you are cultivating the soil to its utmost capacity, I shall not meddle; but if it seems to me that you are letting it lie fallow while I can draw a furrow to some purpose, you need not warn me off with your old title-deeds; in my ploughshare shall drive.  To a better farmer I will yield right gladly, but I will not be scared away by a sign-board.

Nor need you go very far out of your way to affirm that I have not the requisite experience for writing on such and such topics.  As a principle your remark is absurd.  Cannot a doctor prescribe for typhus fever, unless he has had typhus fever himself?  On the contrary, is he not the better able to prescribe from always having had a sound mind in a sound body?  As a fact, my experience in those things concerning which you allege its insufficiency has never been presented to you for judgment, and its discussion is therefore entirely irrelevant.  If my statements are false, they are false; if my arguments are inconclusive, they are inconclusive:  disprove the one and refute the other.  But whether this state of things be owing to a want of experience, or inability to use experience aright, or any personal circumstance whatever, is a matter in regard to which all the laws of literary courtesy forbid you to concern yourself.