The _Evening Post_ found it necessary to direct the newspaper's attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States expressly requires the President, in vetoing a measure, to set forth his reasons for doing so. In a like forgetfulness of Constitutional provisions for safeguarding the citizen, the same newspaper complained of the police, when Tweed escaped and went into hiding, for not searching every house in New York till the malefactor should be found. It was Parke Godwin who cited the Constitution in answer to that manifestation of ignorance, and he did it with the strong hand of a master to whom forgetfulness of the fundamental law seemed not only inexcusable, on the part of a newspaper writer, but dangerous to liberty as well.
Perhaps the worst case I ever knew of ignorance assuming the critical functions of expert knowledge, was one which occurred some years later. William Hamilton Gibson published a superbly illustrated work, which won commendation everywhere for the exquisite perfection of the drawings, both in gross and in minute detail. A certain art critic who had made a good deal of noise in the world by his assaults upon the integrity of art treasures in the Metropolitan Museum, assailed Gibson's work in print. Finding nothing in the illustrations that he could criticise, he accused Gibson of sailing under false colors and claiming credit for results that were not of his creation. He said that nearly everything of value in the illustrations of Gibson's book was the work not of the artist but of the engraver who, he declared, had "added increment after increment of value" to the crude original drawings.
In a brief letter to the newspaper which had printed this destructive criticism without its writer's name appended to it, Mr. Gibson had only to direct attention to the fact that the pictures in question were not engravings at all, but slavish photographic reproductions of his original drawings, and that no engraver had had anything whatever to do with them.
The criticism to which so conclusive a reply was possible was anonymous, and its author never acknowledged or in any way sought to atone for the wanton wrong he had sought to inflict under cover of anonymity. But his agency in the matter was known to persons "on the inside" of literature, art, and journalism, and the shame of his deed rankled in the minds of honest men. He wrote little if anything after that, and the reputation he had made faded out of men's memory.