as you suggest, to make any denial to you personally. It seems to me the record of the "Dispatch" and the "Pioneer Press" is the important thing, and this is open to anybody who cares to read our files.
The letter concludes by warning me of the risk I shall run
if I reprint "the assertions of a dismissed employe." I reply
to the writer, Mr. H. R. Galt, managing editor of the "Dispatch"
and the "Pioneer Press," that his letter is unsatisfactory.
The strong point about Mr. Liggett's three articles
is that they are based upon precisely the thing Mr. Galt
invites—a study of the files of the newspapers. Mr. Liggett
states that certain things are found in these files. I offer to
send Mr. Galt copies of the articles, which he says he does not
possess; I again invite him to point out to me in detail which
of Mr. Liggett's charges are false. I also ask him why, if
the charges are false, he did not take Mr. Liggett up at the
time, and inflict upon him the legal penalties with which he
threatens me. I suggest that any jury of Americans will display
curiosity about that point. To which Mr. Galt replies:
I shall be content to advise you again, as I did in my previous
letter, that the articles upon which you have apparently based your
verdict are untruthful in every particular in which they reflect upon
the "Dispatch" and "Pioneer Press," and that in republishing them
or any part of them, or in repeating any statements reflecting on these
newspapers which may be contained in them, you will not only be publishing
falsehoods, but having been advised in advance that they are
falsehoods, you will publish them maliciously.
Now pray proceed with your indictment of American Journalism as reported by Mr. Liggett, and do not worry yourself about the curiosity of any jury so far as we are concerned. At the proper time we shall be abundantly able to satisfy any curiosity on this point.
Now, when a man comes at me making a face like that, I
have but one impulse in my soul—that is, to jump into a pair
of seven-league boots, and turn and skedaddle as hard as I
know how to the other side of the world and hide in a coal-bin.
I am not joking; that is really the way I feel. There is nothing
in the world I dread so much as a personal wrangle, and
these fierce and haughty and powerful men throw me into a
tremble of terror. The things I enjoy in this world are my
books and my garden, and rather than go into a jury-room,
and wrangle with fierce and haughty and powerful men, I
would have my eye-teeth pulled out. But then I think, as I
have thought many times in my life before, of the millions of
