Baltimore Evening Sun (10 June 1911): 6.

Sixty cents reward to anyone who will offer one good excuse for the City Council’s existence.

A bilious correspondent of the New York Times, discussing the campaign now under way in New York against the so-called loan sharks, or 20 per cent. usurers, calls attention to the fact, so often overlooked by reformers and moralists, that two-thirds of the victims of such sharks are spendthrifts and deadbeats who deserve no sympathy whatever. If it were true, as we are asked to believe, that the sharks preyed only upon the unfortunate and distressed, then there would be some excuse, perhaps, for treating them as vultures. But as a matter of fact, their chief customers are the incurably extravagant and improvident—persons who run up bills and then run away, persons who persistently live beyond their incomes.

For all his precautions and relentlessness, the average loan shark, I venture to estimate, loses fully 15 per cent. of the money he lends. He is in constant conflict vith all of the worst beats in the community–men and women who have long since lost whatever credit they once had—whose promise to pay is worth no more than a politician’s promise to be honest. Naturally enough, he tries to protect himself. Hence his extortionate interest charges, his chicaneries with attachments and chattel mortgages, his general endeavor to take advantage of every point in his favor. Once he relaxed this unmerciful rigor he would quickly go to ruin. Fully a half of his customers, if he didn’t use force to make them pay, would never think of paying at all.

It is true, of course, that honest and innocent persons occasionally fall into the loan shark’s trap and are barbarously robbed before they can wriggle out. Some means of protecting such persons should be devised. They are genuine and pitiful victims. But any remedial legislation which proceeds upon the assumption that such folk make up the whole, or even a large part, of the loan shark’s clientele, and that, in consequence, his net profits are inordinately high, is bound to make chattel loans impossible and so do more harm than good. The shark, in brief, must be permitted to demand heavy interest if he is to exist at all. In the game he plays the chances are always against him. When he wins at all, he must win a lot.

All banking is a form of gambling. When a national bank lends money on a note it makes a bet that it will get that money back, and when a loan shark lends money on a crayon portrait he does that very thing. The difference between the bank and the shark is that the security demanded and obtained by the former is, in the very nature of things, much better than the security demanded by the latter, and that, in consequence, its chances of losing are less. In the comparative smallness of his risk lies the high respectability of the banker. In the greatness of his lies the low respectability of the shark. Otherwise, the two are brothers. Both adjust their terms to the needs of the customer and his ability to pay. The more desperate his need, the higher the cost of the accommodation he gets.

It is easy to show that the loan shark, in individual cases, practices an abominable extortion upon poor and helpless folk, but it is not so easy to show that he is wholly evil. Poor and helpless folk sometimes need money badly—and who else is willing to lend it to them? Certainly the man who takes that great risk, and who is exposed, by the nature of his business, to the assaults of every petty swindler and deadbeat in the community, should be allowed to take a profit that will compensate him richly and so make the trade worth his while.

The poor and helpless are constantly in trouble, and their troubles constantly excite our compassion. But let it not be forgotten that, in the long run, it is a good thing for the world that poverty and helplessness carry heavy penalties. The heavier those penalties the more obvious the benefits of thrift, industry and efficiency—in brief, of all the qualities which make for human progress. A world in which shiftlessness and laziness and vice and lack of foresight carried no penalties at all would be a world which would go backward instead of forward.

Pity the poor loan shark! He might be worse. For example, he might be a politician. Sometimes he is.

Profound thoughts of modern philosophers:

Life is * * * a troubled sea, and most of us get seasick.—The Rev. G. A. Johnston Ross. If you women were required to wear muzzles, I wouldn’t have so much trouble with your quarrels.—Llewellyn, J. Don’t talk too much with Democratic workers in your ward.—The Hon. John J. Hanson. It is sad, but nevertheless true, that stock market values are often made through manipulation.—The Hon. Elbert H. Gary.

From a fair correspondent comes this earnest protest:

Why do you pray for deliverance from George Bernard Shaw? I am a modest and unlearned creature, and far from as advanced as I would like to be. And because I think that women ought to be as our Irish friend portrays them. I take objection to your attitude toward him.

The trouble with George, in brief, is that he has begun to take himself seriously. When he was a carefree merry andrew he was amusing enough, but since becoming a wholesale reformer he has also become a bore. That same trouble also afflicts boomers, sensational preachers, college professors, journalists, live wires, human dynamos, mayors of Baltimore, the officers of the Salvation Army and those of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association. It is my own private, pet curse and menace—from which I pray for deliverance. Once any man who devotes himself to bawling into the ear of the public begins to fancy seriously that his continued existence is of any appreciable value to that public—then, O Fair Correspondent, it is high time to lead him to the dog pound.

Also, there are about 300 good jobs in the Water Department—and perhaps the honest fellows who earned them on a late occasion begin to grow restless.

There are modest actors, although the very nature of their vocation begets vanity and enlarges the ego.—The Dramatic Mirror.

Perhaps the Mirror will favor the world with a list of such modest actors—if, in point of fact, they have any actual existence.

If billboard advertising is a good thing for a city, then the late Joseph Gans was the best citizen Baltimore ever had. Why not a monument to him in Mount Vernon Place?