HENRY WARD BEECHER
Stk.—The defaming of eminent Victorians and their American contemporaries has long been a blood sport, safer and perhhps more lucra- tive than big-game .hunting: but may an old man who, long ago, lived in Brooklyn and knew Mr. Beecher's fellow-citizens protest against the easy assumption that he was a 'holy humbug'?
The Tilton-Beecher trial dragged on for six months; the whole vast acreage of accusation and slander was muckraked for every tittle of evidence against him—and with what result? The jury voted him not guilty, by a majority of 9 to 3. More than this, the judge who had presided at the trial (fudge Joseph Neilson) presided eight years later at a public meeting in honour of Mr. Beecher's seventieth birth- day, and the leading counsel for Tilton (William A. Beach) declared after the trial that, at the end, he was convinced of Beecher's innocence: 'I felt that we were a pack of hounds trying to drag down a noble lion.'
Even so, Beecher may have been guilty; but to suggest that his soul was 'steeped in humbug' is to insult a whole'generation who knew him and honoured him—such men as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, John Greenleaf Whittier. Lyman Abbott; and in England Dean Stanley, Joseph Parker, Henry Allon and Henry Irving. —Yours faithfully, GWILYM 0. GRIFFITH
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