If Herman Cain is holding his ground in the polls despite the sexual harassment charges against him — as some soundings suggest — our guess is that it has to do with the spirit of the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This is the article of the Constitution that contains what is known as the “confrontation clause.” It says that in all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him. There just seems to be something un-American about being confronted with allegations from an accuser who won’t put his or her name out there and submit to questions.

No doubt some will scoff that Mr. Cain is not the subject of a criminal prosecution, so that the right contained in the Sixth doesn’t belong in the discussion. It may also be that Mr. Cain’s campaign will yet unravel because of the tumult over the news, first brought in by Politico, that a women at the National Restaurant Association that Mr. Cain served as chief executive officer accused him of inappropriate behavior toward her. It turns out not to be the only complaint about him. But so far our sense is that the right to confront one’s accusers strikes most Americans, as it did the Founders, as just a fundamental element of justice, essential to the ferreting out of the truth.

So sacred is this principle that the Supreme Court won’t even let children be shielded from confronting persons against whom they are testifying. In one case, the state of Iowa tried to hide an accusing child behind a screen, only to be over-ruled by the Supreme Court in an opinion that quoted the lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Then call them to our presence — face to face, and frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear the accuser and the accused speak freely.” In another case, the court later allowed the use of a closed circuit television arrangement to enable a child testimony to be piped to the defendant; even then, a lawyer for the defendant had to be in the room with the accusing child.

We are not complaining here about Politico. By our lights, the press is sovereign, meaning that, under our constitutional order, the proprietor of Politico is the proper judge of what is appropriate for Politico to print. But a charge by an anonymous accuser, whose lawyer pipes up and makes all sorts of lurid allegations without naming the accuser for whom he’s acting or giving the accused a chance to face the accuser, strikes us as something over which the voters are unlikely to cashier a candidate. We’re not suggesting that the charges are un-serious or inaccurate. Only that life presents hard choices, and one of them is that if one is going to try to destroy the good name of a man or a woman, it may require one to assume some personal risk — even if one is a victim of harrassment or another crime. The refusal to make one’s charges out in the open will be viewed with skepticism by many Americans. This is what is suggested by Herman Cain’s continued strength in the polls.