Baltimore Evening Sun (11 July 1911): 6.

Portrait of an American citizen who knows the standing of all the league clubs, the rules of bridge whist, polo and lawn tennis, and the difference between a Boston dip and a hop waltz, but has not had time to inform himself as to the nature and purport of the Sherman act, the Canadian reciprocity treaty or the movement for the direct election of United States Senators:

Ordinance No. 94, approved May 20, 1890, and embodied in Article 1, Section 37, of the Baltimore City Code of 1906:

It shall not be lawful for any person sustaining any official or relation of employment to the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore to be concerned directly or indirectly in the purchase of any debt due from the corporation or of any claim upon the same, or to be interested in any manner, on his own personal account, in work done for or supplies furnished to the city, or to receive on his own personal account or on any account except that of the city, any percentage or sum on any purchases or contracts made by or entered into by the city, and any such person offending herein or violating in any manner, the provisions of Section 5, of Article XI, of the Constitution of Maryland (which declares that it shall not be lawful for any person holding any office under the city to be interested while holding such office in any contract to which the city is a party), etc., etc.

From Article 4, Section 15, of the Code of Public Local Laws of Maryland, entitled City of Baltimore:

All bids made to the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore for supplies of work for any purpose whatever, unless otherwise provided for in this article, shall be opened by a board, or a majority of them, consisting of the Mayor, who shall be president of the same; the Comptroller, City Register, City Solicitor, and President of the Second Branch, which board, or majority of them, shall, after opening said bids, award the contract to the lowest responsible bidder.

Don’t blame the printer for the unlovely apertures which here appear in these solemn enactments. He received, in fact, a polite request to put them there–as symbols of the loopholes that have been found in the said enactments since the adoption of business methods in the City Hall.

What has become of the virtuosi of virtue? Why haven’t they demanded Marshal Farman’s scalp, pronounced a curse upon him, burned him at the stake? On Sunday, as everyone knows, he issued an order permitting icemen to serve ice, in direct violation of the laws of Maryland and chapter one, article one, section one, verse one, of the Baltimore code of morals, and yet not a single letter of protest has come to The Sun and not a single professional moralist has denounced the Police Board or appealed to the Mayor or asked the courts for a writ of mandamus or capias or besayle or certiorari or recaption or estrepement.

Obviously, the serving of ice on Sunday is a crime of the first calibre, and the man who permits it, no less than the man who commits it, should feel the force of an outraged and indignant public opinion. Once the common people grow used to having ice on the Sabbath they will make a demand for other comforts, and from comforts they will proceed to the poor luxuries within their means, and from luxuries to divertisements–and thus our Baltimore Sunday will lose its ancient and honorable character of a day of dullness and self-infliction, of torture and immolation, of sacrifice and renunciation. In other and more worldly towns that thing has actually happened. In Worcester, Mass., the Sabnath has become a hissing and a mocking, for baseball is permitted there and thousands are led to spend the day in sin. In Steubenville, Ohio, the moving-picture shows are open. In Vincennes, Ind., the children play ring-around-a-rosey in the public squares. Let Baltimore beware of the example of such modern Gomorrohs.

Marshal Farnan’s cold-blooded law-breaking reveals a lamentable and apparently total ignorance of the purposes of the Sabbath. That day, in Baltimore, is not a day of recreation and refreshment, as he seems to fancy, but a day of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Its aim is to turn the thoughts of every citizen to his misery and his sinfulness. The trouble with the average citizen, of course, is that he lacks an acute sense of sin. It is hard to convince him that he is wallowing in iniquity: against all logic and decency he insists upon regarding himself as a pretty good fellow. Hence, the Baltimore, or mortuary Sunday. Its design is to create a sensation of utter wretchedness and to lay the foundation, in that way, for the feeling of sin. On the one hand it punishes and on the other hand it seeks to convince the culprit that his punishment has been deserved.

Is this noble and elevating purpose to be abandoned? Are we to give over Sunday to the iceman, that servant of iniquity? On the specious plea of saving the lives of a few hundred babies, are we to open the way for the consumption of ice-creams, water-ices and other such devil’s truck, and for the concoction, in secluded kitchens, of lemonades, milk shakes, ginger pops–nay, cocktails and high-balls? A million noes!

In the present fiscal emergency, with an extortionate tax rate threatening and skill of the first order needed to save the city from disaster, it must be consoling to the taxpayer to reflect that his fate is in the hands of so intelligent, so unselfish and so independent a body as the First Branch of the City Council.

The Voice of the People as the breezes waft it in:

H. L. Mencken