proceed at once to observe in answer to the suggestion of your correspondent with ‘name in full’ that as I hold the true principle of newspaper correspondence to be Non Quis sed Quid – not who writes, but what is written – and as I have no desire for notoriety nor for seeing my name in print, I must decline to gratify him by removing my ‘gauze screen’. In return, I will offer him a counter suggestion. Let him procure the same article for himself, the most impervious he can find before he addresses you again, and I will promise him not to commit the indiscretion of attempting to remove it without his consent. I can assure him that to employ a ‘Nominis umbra’ is no ‘un-English’ device, but the natural consequence of a free press and free institutions....It is, I have no doubt my expression of opinion on other points, and not my interference with that bubble, the Hastings Harbour Association that has so exited(sic) your correspondent, and stirred up his ‘dispeptic symptoms’. He is known to us all as a well meaning man, and we all wish him well. Why, then, doesn’t he ‘Let-well-alone’, instead of constantly getting into hot water at the risk of scalding his fingers?”
Another from “Let-well-alone”. This gentleman having been reminded that he had wandered from the subject, and must in any further communication keep to it, wrote again, in the following week in these words:- “Sir, - In reference to the editorial remark appended to the letter ‘Let-well-alone versus The name in full’ will you kindly permit me to observe that that letter was evidently intended as an answer to a printed attack on ‘Mr. Let-well-alone and his pop-gun’, which clearly called for another pop in return; and your correspondent with the “Name-in-full’ having wandered from the harbour into certain by-paths, there was no alternative but to follow him. I readily admit that the greater part of that ‘assault without battery’, was only to be laughed at, and that I might very well have said, with Lord Derby’s Lifeguardsman, when his shrew of a wife tried to pummel him, ‘Never mind; it amuses her and it does not hurt me.’ But I could not allow it to be supposed that I had found fault with the management of educational institutions in this place without stating some of the grave, and as I think, very sufficient reasons which induced me to do so. As regards the benevolent institutions, it is simply a misstatement. The would-have-been Reformers, of whom I was one, and whose sound and benevolent views were thwarted by the selfishness of some and the silliness of others, signed a printed circular and publicly expressed their opinions at the meeting. The cry was then -
