Baltimore Evening Sun (8 July 1911): 6.

From Marion Harland’s Complete Cook Book, that sapient and invaluable work, I lift the following recipe for fried liver:

Cut the liver into strips an inch wide and four inches long. Heat two tablespoonfuls of butter—or drippings–in a frying pan and fry a slice of onion in it. Strain out the onion. Have ready the liver, peppered, salted and rolled in flour. Put this into the fat and cook, turning once. Take up the liver and keep hot over boiling water. Stir into the fat left in the pan two tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce, and a heaping teaspoonful of browned flour wet to a paste in cold water. Add salt and paprika, to taste.

From the Twentieth Century Cook Book, another estimate treatise, the following somewhat simpler recipe is taken:

Cut the liver into thin slices, season with salt and pepper and sprinkle a little flour over each slice. Put in a skillet which has been heated, with drippings of lard in it, cover with a top, and fry slowly until both sides are done.

But why print recipes for fried liver? Simply because the common people of Baltimore, of whom I have the honor to be one, will do a lot of liver-eating during the next four years. We proved, on the Tuesday following the first Monday in May, that we were brave and relentless foes of silk-stocking despotism and newspaper dictation. And pretty soon, when the tax bills come in, we will begin to pay for that day’s sport. Those of us who have been eating porterhouse will begin to eat the round, and those of us who have been feasting upon the round will learn the taste of liver.

A glance at the programs of the Park Band allows that the educational work of that body of music masters is going forward apace. The Compositions of Holtzmann, Bendix, Lampe and other such latter-day Beethovens are played nightly, and no doubt the effect upon the plain people is extremely beneficial. A child who has once heard “The Battle of San Juan Hill” and the “High Jinks” march is a child where ears have been laid back by celestial harmonies, and who has, in consequence, shakn off much of its primitive savagery. Such consummations are plainly worth the $10,000 or more that the Park Band costs the taxpayers of Baltimore every summer.

The professional moralists and smut-hounds of New York had a high old time of it last week when a new troupe of Russian dancers, some of them with bare legs, began cavorting on the stage of a Broadway theatre. These performers came from the Imperial Opera House at St. Petersburg and had the enthusiastic approval of Paris and London behind them, but the moralists saw only their legs, and so protests began to pour in upon Mayor Gaynor. The Mayor ordered Police Commissioner Waldo to look into the matter, and Waldo asked a police captain and a police magistrate to attend the performance and make note of its indecencies. The two reported that it was not indecent at all. So the show is going on and the moralists once more set up a cry for a censor—for a censor, that is, of abnormally sensitive nose—for one guaranteed to detect indecency at a distance of 1,000 yards and through five blankets, and eager to put it down with torquemadan savagery.

The same cry goes up every now and then in Baltimore, but so far the common sense of the community has resisted it. As a matter of fact, it must be plain to any sane man that a censorship is not only utterly repugnant to American ideas of freedom, but that it is entirely unnecessary and that, once in operation, it is bound to make for persecution, extortion and all other corruptions. Our present laws are strong enough to put down and punish any actual offense to public decency. Any citiizen is free to go before the grand jury and lodge a complaint against a theatrical manager or performer who offends, and if that manager or performer, after a fair trial, is found guilty, there is provision for his swift and severe punishment. No further legislation or machinery is needed to give force to the laws which already prevail.

A censorship, far from increasing the efficacy of such laws, would have the effect of obfuscating and corrupting them, for it would take the prerogative of interpreting and enforcing them out of the hands of judges and juries and put it into the hands of bureaucrats. In other words, the accused manager’s right to be tried as other accused men and tried by his equals and in the light of day, would be destroyed, and he would have to submit himself and his property to the judgment of a small group of Dogberries. How long such Dogberries would remain fair, or even honest, I leave any man to judge. On the one hand they would be tempted to enforce drastic and outrageous regulations, and so win the loud praises of the hyper-virtuous, and on the other hand, they would be tempted to be over-easy, and so win the bribes of the managers. And the evils inherent in one temptation would be exactly equal to those inherent in the other.

In England the censorship established in the eighteenth century has worked such unbearable hardships upon sincere, artistic endeavor that a recent Parliamentary commission recommended that dramatists and theatrical managers be released from it forthwith. And the English censor, let it be remembered, has always been an undoubtedly honest man—which not one American censor out of 500 would be for more than six months. He has taken no bribes; he has levied no blackmail; he has tried to do rigid justice. But the virtuosi of virtue have so persistently harassed him with their absurd demands for chemical purity that he has been forced, in sheer self-defense, to prohibit the performance of some of the noblest dramas of modern times.

We Americans want no censorship—particularly in the theatre. Most of the demand for it comes not from persons who harbor a sincere yearning to see the theatre improved, but from persons who subscribe frankly to the Puritanical and numskull doctrine that the theatre, under all imaginable conditions, is an abomination–in brief, from persons so marvelously sensitive to indecency that they see it in such honest and cleanly works of art as John Galsworthy’s “Justice,” or James M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” or Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.” What a filthy hole the world would be if such folk were permitted to fashion and interpret it! What a nasty mess they would make of all beautiful things—of all things that ease the agonies of life and all things that increase its joys!

No matter how hot the weather, it is still possible for booms to freeze.

Boil your drinking water! Look out for ptomaines! Rush the can! Take a bath! Swat the fly! Don’t rock the boat!

H. L. Mencken