Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August 1911): 6.

The lesson for the day is from the twentieth chapter of Exodus, the sixteenth verse.

From one using the pen-name of “Anti-Vivisection” comes a protest against certain remarks about anti-vivisectionism and their puerilities printed in this place the other day. In the course of those remarks I credited the following absurd statement to a certain Dr. Charles Bell-Taylor, a distinguished British anti-vivisectionist:

It is not true that Pasteur has discovered a cure for hydrophobia. Pasteur does not cure hydrophobia, he gives it.

To this quotation “Anti-Vivisection” objects on the ground that the real author was not Bell-Taylor, but one Professor Peter, “the greatest clinician which (sic) France has produced in the nineteenth century.” In brief, the familiar New Thought cry of falsifier and ignoramus is raised again. I misquoted Bell-Taylor—and therefore all my other statements must be dubious too.

In reply, let me refer this critic to a little pamphlet entitled “An Appeal for the Defenseless,” by Charles Bell-Taylor, M. D., F. R. C. S. E., “Hon. Surgeon Nottingham and Midland Eye Infirmary, etc., Fellow of the Medical Society of London, Late President of the Parisian Medical Society,” and issued by and with the imprint of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass. On page 5 of that pamphlet, without quotation marks and with Bell-Taylor’s name signed to them, she will find the very statement I quoted and exactly as I quoted it. If, as she says, its real author was not Bell-Taylor, but the mysterious Professor Peter, then it becomes evident that Bell-Taylor (who died in 1909, at the age of 80) was not only a singularly callous false witness, even for an anti-vivisectionist, but also a deliberate plagiarist.

American appellations for the foam which floats upon the great Bavarian vitalizer:

Collar Icing Suds Bubbles, Water Lily Bonnet, Skull-Cap Helmet, Lid Blanket, Bandage Crown.

From maniacs who say “How do you like the water?” and from those who answer “My, ain’t it awful!”—kind fates, deliver us!

Can it be that the Hon. Charles H. Dickey, director-general of the current boom, is losing something of his former firm faith in “scientific” boomery? Certainly there are marks of lamentable heresies in his first encyclical to the common people of Baltimore, sent from London through The Evening Sun. Once he was all for that quantitative increase which boomotherapists, with their free building lots, there tax exemptions and all that sort of thing, recommend as a sure cure for all our ills; now he seems to flirt with the heterodox qualitative theory, which places a better Baltimore above a bigger Baltimore.

So, at least, I understand his encyclical, for in it he deplores the fact that the streets of all the English towns he has visited are so much better than those of Baltimore, and seems to lean toward the notion that an improvement in the latter would be desirable, and even profitable. Oh, the knocker! Doesn’t he know that it is highly indecent for a True Baltimorean to admit, in public, that Baltimore could be improved? Has he never read the Official Oath of all boomers, as drawn up by the Hon. Edwin L. Quarles, to wit:

My household shall be taught besides the fear of God. at least one thing: the art of living for the good of this their town: that they must seldom speak of its deficiencies, and only then at home, etc., etc.

Mr. Dickey, I fear, is being contaminated by his travels. Unless he is quickly recalled and given a reparative course in genuine booster-roosting. he may come home at last full of the wild heresy that a deodorized harbor would be more valuable to Baltimore than a dozen new guano factories on the old quarantine tract, and decent streets of more avail than 40 Beehives, and a lower death-rate a greater gain than 100 new jobbing houses, with their 5,000 $13-a-week employes. Going further, he may actually hold these improvements to be so desirable that he will publicly and loudly murn their lack—and so put himself frankly into the awful ranks of the knockers.

“I sometimes feel that * * * if more were done for the comfort of the people * * * we could accomplish more and”—but I quote no further. Let a committee be sent to Europe at once to overtake Mr. Dickey and wrestle with him, and exhort him, and, if possible, lead him back to the fold. And if he escapes or resists, then let him be solemnly excommunicated.

A writer in London Punch, discoursing upon the physical signs or psychic conditions, argues earnestly that the admirers of John Galsworthy may be distinguished by their weary, care-worn faces, and those of Maurice Hewlett by their red lips and springy steps. The subject invites the roving psychologist and facts in corroboration quickly suggest themselves. It was Mark Twain who first noticed that the boy who never plays “hookey” always has translucent ears, and it was George Ade, I believe, who first pointed out the intimate connection between crimson, medicated lingerie and a belief in political panaceas. Let the list be made longer. Psychical research is accompanied by hirsute luxuriance; a regard for Tolstoi discourages the care of the fingernails; detachable cuffs go with the theory that Charles Klein is a greai dramatist. Certainly the subject deserves and demands a thorough investigation.

A writer in The Democratic Telegram, discoursing upon language teaching in the public schools, objects strenuously to that substitution of spoken American for book English which I lately proposed. Says he:

To contend that the child should be taught to say “I ought to have went” instead of “I should have gone” is equivalent to throwing grammar to the winds.

So it is, friend, if you mean English grammar. But I was contending for the abandonment of English grammar as useless and confusing and the adoption in its place of American grammar. By the rules of American grammar, “I ought to have went” is perfectly correct, and by those same rules “I should have gone” is not only incorrect, but also extremely silly, affected, strained and laughable. Why not teach the children the language they will actually speak all their lives?

The Voice of the People, as the zephyrs waft it in:

I ain’t a-goin’ to drink no more o’ that water no more. Me neither.