a private club, informally; and, at the last, only assented to the title of the lecture being mentioned.
I dare say the report was also incorrect. Such reports generally are. I have not read it.
Respectfully yours,
This letter completely dissolved my illusion. It showed me at once that General Walker's fairness, like that of his brother economist, Professor Ely, lay entirely on the surface,—the only difference between them, perhaps, being that, while Professor Ely falsified deliberately and with knowledge of the truth. General Walker spoke in ignorance, though posing as a teacher, and became a hypocrite only after the fact, by refusing to know the truth or have it pointed out to him. Here is a man, famous as an economist, with a reputation to sustain, who has time to prepare and deliver, or else to deliver without preparation, before a private club, on the uppermost and most important question of the day, an address so long that even an inadequate report of it filled a column and a half in the Boston Post, but has not one hour in which to listen to proof offered in substantiation of a charge of gross error preferred against him by one who for fifteen years has made this question a subject of special study.
It will not do for him to plead in excuse that the Post's report, which he has not read, may be incorrect, and that therefore the charge of error may be based on statements unwarrantably attributed to him. It so happens that it falls to my lot as a daily journalist to revise and prepare for publication reports of all descriptions to the number of several hundred a week, and in consequence I know an intelligent report when I see one as infallibly as a painter knows a good picture when he sees one. In the report in question there maybe minor inaccuracies; as to that I cannot say: but as a whole it is a report of uncommon excellence and intelligence. Given a report containing a mass of errors, if these errors are the reporter's, they will be a jumble; if, on the other hand, they bear a definite relation to each other and proceed from a common and fundamental error, it is sure that they are not the reporter's errors, but the lecturer's. In this case the error fallen into at the start is so consistently held to and so frequently repeated that it would be contrary to the law of chances to hold the reporter responsible for it; General Walker must answer for it himself. And as he will not listen to a private demonstration offered in a friendly spirit, I am compelled to
