OUTIS IN REPLY TO MR GLOVER.

Waikato Times, Volume XXX, Issue 2475, 22 May 1888, Page 3

OUTIS IN REPLY TO MR GLOVER.

TO TilE EDITOR. Sin, —In tha absence of Sir W. Pox, Mr Glover. I understand, paid my letter in your Thursday's issue, the compliment of bin notice; he however, declines discussing any question with an anonymous correspondent, Now, sir, this is a very fine debating retort; it is so easy to declaim on the cowardly un-English fashion of stabbing a man in the dark, and a little virtuous indignation of this sort carries your audience away with you at once, especially when your sympathisers in it are organised, and your opponents are an undisciplined mob who enjoy the fun all the more the harder the hitting is. Most persons who reflect on the matter, however, will agree that if the attainment of truth be the only object of the disputants, anomynity is one of the first conditions. He who argues simply for victory, may wish to reinforce his side with the weight of personal influence, or to discredit the strain of their opponents arguments by the weakness of their social or moral position; he whose only aim is the truth will welcome the exclusion of por'Sonal prejudice. There are only two cases where a signature seems necsssary Ist. Where charges are made against the character of a person or a class ; 2nd. where a man is paid for his services and must justify their value to his subscribers. Mr Houchiu's therefore, was bound to avoid anomynity, as he used worse terms than even "glutton" or "wine bibber," but I, who never said of these modern John Baptist that "they had a devil" and whose only aim is truth, rightly refuse to discount the value of my argument by the obtrusion of the question, utterly unimportant except to myself, cf my personal worth. The fact is, sir, that a certain class of agitators in the press, as on the platform, are deprived of three-fuurths of their armoury when their opponents fight under shield. They get on swimmingly as long as they can interlard their languages with "bloody Balfour" and "scarlet woman of Babylon " ad libitum, but confinement to fact and argument sadly diminishes their power over the sympathetic accord of their am, &e., Ovxw.