Baltimore Evening Sun (15 July 1911): 6.

The lesson for the day is from the fifth chapter of the Koran, entitled the Table, the first verse.

A term loosely used in these days of high controversy is “Prestonism.” What does it mean, precisely? Among those who employ it there seems to be no agreement. Certain admirers of the Mayor make it an exact synonym for Jeffersonianism; others seem to impose a military and theological significance upon its original political meaning. And the foes of his Honor are equally vague. Some of them appear to confuse Prestonism with Nihilism; others give it a comic color and freely interchange it with quackery, harlequinado and narrheit.

Certain there should be an effort to define the thing more clearly. The School Board suggests itself as a suitable authority—but the School Board is too hard pressed at the moment to give attention to such academic matters. A man in actual and precipitate flight from psychic snakes seldom pauses to deliver a temperance speech. Meanwhile, some private philologist may be willing to tackle the job. Send in, messieurs, your definitions, The author of the best will receive, as his his reward, a box of Pennsylvania cigars.

Animadverting lately upon the New Thought, that puerile balderdash, I employed the term New Thinker to designate one who believes in it. Here, it appears, I was wrong. The proper designation is not New Thinker, but New Thoughter. The latter, at any rate, is used by the editor of the Nautilus (July number, page 2), and the Nautilus, being the official organ of all who think newly, must be accepted as an authority.

The Nautilus is a very prosperous-looking magazine and claims a monthly circulation of 47,500 copies. The current issue has 40 pages of advertisements, most of which are devoted to various schools of quackery. A seminary of Mechano-Therapy offers to teach that art, which seems to be a brother to osteopathy, by mail in a few months. “If you are earning less than $3,000 a year,” says the announcement, “it will pay to investigate our correspondence course.” Graduates earn from $3,000 to $5,000 a year. We are further told that “20,000,000 people in the United States today consult a drugless healer whenever they are sick”—probably a slight overestimate.

If mechano-therapy doesn’t listen well, there is chiropractic, an even more wonderful magic. The chiropractic seminary promises the student who completes its correspondence course an income of from $200 to $600 a mouth. A great chance for plowboys, deck hands and gravel roofers. Why work, when pathology is so easy?

A whole page of the Nautilus is given over to the following “poem” by Edwin Markham, who divides, with Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the honor of being poet laureate of the New Thoughters:

A masterpiece of occult philosophy! Perhaps Edwin may be induced to give rhythmic embellishment, next month, to some other ancient platitude—for example, to “Honesty is the best policy.” Some of the advertisers in the Nautilus would be benefited by a correspondence course in that platitude. One of them is E. A. See, the gentleman who was convicted in Chicago on Thursday of abducting and seducing a 17-year-old girl. See has a flaming advertisement of his Absolute Life propaganda on page 93 of the July Nautilus. On page 5 of the same issue appears this humorous note:

The publishers of the Nautilus use every reasonable effort to see that only advertisements of reliable concerns appear in its columns.

The joke lies in the fact that See was actually in jail in Chicago when his July advertisement was written. There is, indeed, a plain reference to his imprisonment in the first paragraph of it.

From the Watertown Standard, an esteemed public gazette of Central New York:

To Ned Mather, a native of this city and a man who spent his declining years here, is given credit for originating the idea of free lunches. He inaugurated the first free lunch in Baltimore, and Baltimore historians place the year at either 1865 or 1866. The front bar at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore, where the quality folk gathered, is where it is said to have originated.

The archives of the Baltimore Bartenders’ Union show that the actual date was April 16, 1859. The first free lunch was set out at Barnum’s at 10.30 o’clock in the morning of that day, and consisted, like many of its successors, of radishes, box cheese, dill pickles, sour tongue, oyster crackers and blutwurst. Blutwurst was then a novelty in this country. The first consignment, of 200 links, had been landed at Locust Point a few days before, from the old packetship Blucher, Captain Knortz. The steward of Barnum’s, always on the lookout for victualene novelties, bought the whole lot, and the succulent Westphalian delicacy, when set before the patrons of the hotel, made a sensation.

The free lunch at Barnum’s retained its Jeffersonian simplicity but a short time. By the end of the Civil War it was an elaborate banquet, and three or four blackamoors had to be told off to serve it. In winter dainty little wild duck sandwiches were served, and in summer soft crabs on toast. It was once brought out in court proceedings that the cost of the hotel’s free lunches, in 1869, reached an average of $41.82 a day. At that time the late Alonzo O’Rourke was chief of the lunch bureau, at a salary of $3,000 a year.

An eminent Baltimore street saloonkeeper tells me that the cost of his free lunch now runs from $85 to $110 a week. On the books there is a law forbidding Baltimore saloonkeepers to give free lunches, but the police, in the exercise of their judicial power, have repealed it. What may be called the orthodox, or standard free lunch new consists of the following victuals:

The new thesaurus of popular and refined American synonyms for intoxicated:

What a rich, racy, fluent, hospitable, sonorous and beautiful language!

H. L. Mencken