Here is the letter, in its essentials:
... This number contains some of the most insidious and dangerous fallacies that it has been my fortune to peruse in many years, and that are only intended to craftily instil into the minds of the "rather large class" of people the erroneous doctrines thus covertly inculcated by insinuations and to promote the consequent satisfaction with their comparatively hard lot and the necessity of contentment with their own condition as well as with that of those who are subjects of a more forlorn state.
Now I am going to make a proposition to you that will prove conclusively that your object in publishing that Review is solely for the purpose last above enumerated, as I do not hope that you will accept my proposition; and that the Review is supported by the capital of the men who are a part of the financial oligarchy that is bent on ruining the poorer classes of this country: I will write you an article in opposition to the Irrepressible Conflict and the Juggernaut of the Majority, which will be written in as good a diction as either of those articles and not more controversial in tone and style than Irrepressible Conflict, and shall expect as much pay for it as either of those two articles secured to their respective authors, or as much as it is worth if those articles were produced by respective members of the said oligarchy; and shall insist, if you refuse to publish it, that it is the substance and doctrine of it that make it unavailable and not the diction and style. I have a right to ask this as the public press which claims to be the leaders of public opinion, are teeming with just such articles as these that I have criticised and are published for the express purpose of leading me and the remainder of the public astray on vital questions affecting the material interests of us all,—in other words, there is a comprehensive and well formed conspiracy among publishers of almost all newspapers and magazines to do as I have said and to refuse to permit the other side to be heard. I do not expect to ever get an answer to this letter but I shall make just such use of the reticence and your silence as my poor judgment teach me is legitimate and proper.
Our answer was:
... The Unpopular Review is entirely the property of its publishers.
It is not a forum for discussion, but a pulpit for the preaching of what we believe to be sound doctrine. As you don't believe our doctrine is sound, probably we would not believe yours is sound: so your challenge to us to put it in our pulpit is of course outside the case. You should send it to somebody of your own way of thinking, or set up a pulpit of your own—into which we certainly should not wish to challenge you to insert anything of ours.
A change of subject may be welcome.
If any of our readers have been expecting an article on Psychical Research in this number, their disappointment at not finding one may be somewhat assuaged by the realization that the article in the first number was of four times the average length. The apparent neglect here however, is not real, but it has been impracticable to get what we wanted. We hope to be more fortunate in the future.
A Specimen of "Uplift" Legislation
Since the bull against the comet, there has probably been no assertion of authority as absurd as one recently furnished by our National Government. Yet there was no attention called to it in the debate preceding the passage of the act containing it, and we do not remember seeing any notice of it in the press, although it was immense enough and pitiful enough to justify Iliads.
For years, government—and no government more energetically than President Wilson's—had been hammering away at the trusts, especially those producing petroleum, steel and tobacco. Yet petroleum, steel and tobacco are not necessaries of life, nor have their prices been rising as much as the prices of necessaries of life. These have been rising more than anything else. What has been done about them by the government that has been destroying the trusts in other things? It has simply gone out of its way to specially legalize a trust in these things. In a bill providing money to fight trusts in comparatively non-essential things, Congress specially exempted from prosecution any trust that may be formed by the farmers to raise the price of food. Other trusts claim to lower the prices of their products, and sometimes have done it; but our government has not merely authorized the farmers to form trusts, to raise the price of foods, but has specially authorized them, in the letter of the law, to use methods denied to everybody else but wage-earners; and this at a time when the one problem above all others was how to lower the price of foods, and when the high price was the one burden above all others on the poor.