without malice, without venom.

To resume. What I was about to say, was, those thugs have built
their entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and
established facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to
be able to say our side never resorts to it while there is anything
else to resort to.

But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of
that sort.

Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the Works, we
infer that somebody did. Who was it, then? This requires some
more inferring.

Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a
tidal wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of
admiration, delight and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up
and claim the authorship. Why a dozen, instead of only one or two?
One reason is, because there's a dozen that are recognizably
competent to do that poem. Do you remember "Beautiful Snow"? Do
you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to Sleep"? Do you
remember "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight! Make me
a child again just for to-night"? I remember them very well.
Their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who
were alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible
argument in his favor, at least: to wit, he could have done the
authoring; he was competent.

Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't. There was