A Whack Back

To the Editor of The Keqistku.- My Dear Sir: - We have it on the best authority that "the Lord loveth a cheerful giver, " but I am afraid you will not suceeed in making the readers of The Register believe that he has any use for a cheerful liar. I have never been of the opinión that any truth, at any time, or in any place, needed a lie for its auxilliary. I have never in my life believed in that questionablo partnership, the truth plus "poliey. " In ethics, as in physics, a straight line is the shortest distance between any two points; every deviation is of the devil, is only and always a Satanic device and worthy only of the Pather of Lies. Please, mark the words- "A cheerful liar. " I use them advisedly ; for the genus Liar includes many species ; and you know that a species is subdivisable. For instance. we can have the following combinations: Genus, Homo; Species Mendax magnificus. Varieties, u. M. Subtilissinvus. b. M. Joeundissimus. c. M. Jiullheadissimus - and these varia. tions are chiefly owing to the developmentofthe "cheek" of the specimen. The cheorful liar has not been inelud. ed in the category simply because it is so little that a broad-guaged naturalist despises it. I am not a naturalist, but I have been told that your choerful liar is generalij' a pin-headed fellow who lies from a mistaken "sense ofduty." Thomas Hood says, "Evil Is wrought by want of thouglit, As well as want of heart." Therefore, it is that your cheerfu' liar of ten infractsfromsheer ignoranee, which is 8imply want of thought conccrning the truthfulness of that which he so cheerfully tells. Youv cheei-ful Har is also Hable to another lapse, namely, mangling the truth - I mean dissevering it so as to use a half-trutb rather than the whole- and this "fOLways that are dark and for trieks that are vain." I question whether in all the devious devices of the oheerful Har there is one so well adapted to bring the whole (and wholesome) truth into contempt with the very persons for whose sake he descends to this moral debasement. Now because The Register comes into my family and is read by my children I purpose to try a throw with you from considerations which I am afraid you can neither comprehend nor appreciate. I may not, indeed, receive your thanks;1 but I am safely beyond the reach of the condemnation of the "exceedingly small circle of exceedingly saints" whom you represent. Your two letters to The Register impress me with the conviction that you are not single-minded : that you are instigated by a purely personal element rather than by a detestation of vice; that, in a word, your aninius is malicioub. If I am correct, you had better sheathe your swod at once, for you can do it only dishonor. What do I know about your animus! Simply and only what you reveal of it. You evince malice pretense in the opening sentences of your first letter ; you need only open your mouth to show ub that your saliva is rabid. In the apt slang of today, you are "too previous. ' There is no method in your madness. Your rather weak-minded Johnnie has been from homo only "about a month, " when nis fond mother becomes "anxious" about him. Now if Johnnie is not one of the devil's own, why should his mother get anxious in one short month ? Evidently, Johnnie isn't "built right;" he will make his mother "anxious" whcrever he may be, and there is no need that you, in the ostensible service of virtue, should play the part cf the Devil's advocate for Ann Arbor. If you are really "anxious" to protect your puppet, Johnnie, you wllj have to follow him ovor the whole earth. Ann Arbor is not the only gateway to heil, and ï'm sorry for it, because if we had that monopoly it would "build up the tovvn" - a pi uní desideriwm in which both sahils and sinners will join hands ! But your critic does not overlook the suppositiou (on which you write) that Johnnio may be a prime article, and that his mother's anxiety may be vvholly owing to the fact that her dear little Johnnie is -in the high schoo! at Ann Arbor '. The innuendo here is like a stiletto concealed under an assassin's cloak. You stalk into a reputable news paper, rite anonymously, wearing a mask and stabbing in the dark. Your dirty innuendo is unmanly, for one thing, and it evinces crass ignorance ('ontinued on Page Four. A WHACK BACK. Contii uc rf Fr om Jige On?. lor the other. If you mean to assert that Arm Arbor affords exceptional temptations, if you moan that it is lacking in suoh safegTiards as both civili.ation and christianity afford the young, you are eithor unti-uthful on the one hand, or uninformod on the other, and either horn of thodilemma impalesyou. usa "moral veformer, " as corapletely as when an irato farmer nails an unclean birdto hisbarndoor inieiTwem My dear sir, your animus 'outcrops continually dui'ing the recent unheaval of the "moral'' forces that are at work in you. You use poor Johnnie for a stalking horse while, over nis back, you thrash certain professors and President Angelí for smoking tobáceo! Stand up openly, like a man ; express your convictions ; strike right from the shoulder, and asehronicasmoker as I will respect the mere shadow of jouBut your cowardly incognito : Faugh ! Did your heart burn within you to read recently that those "unspeakable Turks"' placed Httle Armenian children in a row to see through how raany a bullet would go? Did it occur to you that you had set up little Johnnie to see how many of the professors tfhat you "lined up" behind him you could shoot through? Did you learn this method from him who proved his convictiobs by the bloody sweat of Gethsemane and the agony of Calvary ? Think, too, of the pitiful twaddle that you put into .Johnnie's raouth about the "example" of professors' smoking. What is Johnnie to do whon he reads that Sir Walter Ralcigh was a snioker of tobáceo, and yet wrote that passage in his History of the World, beginning: "O mighty, just, and eloquent Death" - an apostrophe whieh for moral sub limity is surpassed only in the most exalted passages in Holy VVrit? What is your Johnnie to think when he learns that Milton was a smoker of tobáceo - through all the fumes of which he discerned a lost paradise, regained? What will becomo of Johnnie when he iïnds that Sir Isaac Newton - to whom God revealed one of the deepest secrets of the Universe - was asinokerof tobáceo? What will be Johnnie's opinión of you when he comes to know tbat Thomas Carlyle - that most perfervid of moralists - was a smokerof tobáceo. Depend upon it, if Johnnie has any bowels of compassion he will find some of tl. e same brand for your smoking ! But when Johnnie reads your dennnciations of the abuse of tobáceo applied, by inference, to such use of it as was made by these men, and is made today by millions of others who are by no means the dregs of humanity, what will' he think of your logical capacity? And if he should take an inventory of you as a truth-telling apparatus! Keally, I'm af raid hu will be obliged to conclude that Ananias could not keep the. belt with his modern competitors in the ring. It is even more pitiful that. you can put forth such puerile sophistries in the disguise of a "reformer. " You can but secure the incitable eontempt of the very Johnnie whom you would debauch with suoh spccious half-truths. It is the stench ï'eeking trom such rotten self-righteousness, that makcs the churches of the living God so destitute of those types of manhood whose daily Uves are not a reproachof their professions. A deathless fealty to the truth distinguishes betwoen the reformer and the pseudo-refovmer. A pseudo-vetormer will not discrimínate between temporáneo and total-abstinonce : he will confuse the righteous distinctions, although tlie eternal line of differenec dips down as low as the pit and stretchcs upwards as high as Heavcn. Look, for one moment, at the father and son who are your chosen models. A father who aiises from his bed while little Johnnio, his son, is asleep, and - to search his own child's poekets! If that father had done hisfatherly duty to his child, one month in no high school on earui wouiu nave macie .loünnie unable to teil his own father the simple truth. The father is a snoak "f rom way back" and bis son, aceording to your own account, a "cnip of the old block.'' My dear sir, I have moro than a suspicion that your Johnnie and his father are "bad citizens;" neither of them could trust the other - and you blame the Ann Arbor Jiigh school and its -smoking professors" for that! ' In your last letter, your criticism of President Angelí is hot with malignity becauso you write anonymously. As a public offloer the President of the University expects criticism, for none in public places can escape it; but the oowardly attack of a concealed enemy is only a blessing: and the Bilaam that curses will Bad the aveniring boot in the near neijborh(K)d of his poor ass.