Baltimore Evening Sun (8 September 1911): 6.

In Memory of THE CRUSADE AGAINST SUNDAY SELLING at BACK RIVER Gone–and Almost Forgotten!

The standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League for the week ending August 12:

Baltimore is still well in the lead, but the fans will note with some uneasiness that the Oriole percentage is now 102 points less than the percentages of the next two clubs taken together. If we are to maintain our old-town standard, we must have an end of fly-swatting campaigns and other such fanatical efforts to combat the laws and ukases of nature.

The above figures are based on cases reported. When we come to deaths, the lead of Baltimore is seen to be even less secure–though the actual difference is not great. Here are the percentages:

From “Tobacco: Its Effects,” a pamphlet by Dr. Samuel Bailey, of Mount Ayr, Iowa:

Persons who use tobacco have no regard for moral or social laws or customs. They observe only the civil or statutory laws.

From “Temperance Torchlights,” by Matilda Erickson, quoting one Dr. Brower, given name unknown:

It can be asserted with great certainty that the boy who begins to use cigarettes at 10 will drink beer and whisky at 14, take morphine at 25 and spend the rest of his lifetime alternating between cocaine, spirits and opium.

Why is it that all moral crusades, practically without exception, run to just such childish absurdities? I am a constant and copious reader of all sorts of moral tracts, and in every one of them I find the same wild tendency to overstatement, the same grave piling up of false and ridiculous charges. The prohibitionists, not content with submitting the actual evidence against alcohol, invent testimony so obviously false that it must inevitably make them more foes than friends. The anti-vivisectionists, as I have more than once shown, deliberately garble evidence to suit their holy purpose. The anti-vaccinationists manufacture libels with such amazing fluency that mendacity, with them, may be said to constitute a fine art. And all other breeds of militant moralists are as bad—whether their butt be the cigarette, divorce, carnivorism, Sabbath-breaking, dancing, poker-playing, polygamy or the stage. It is difficult, indeed, to find a single performer who can stick to the plain facts for 10 minutes running.

In part, of course, this habitual exaggeration may be considered a natural symptom of enthusiasm. Any man, when he goes crusading, is apt to lay it on a bit thick. But there is a distinct difference between the mere virulization of actual facts and the deliberate invention of “facts” that are not facts at all. That difference the moralist does not sense. He comes, after a while, to hold that any charge or statement which helps his cause, however widely it may depart from the plain truth, is sound and fair. His constant tendency is to convert suspicions into direct allegations, theories (and even hypotheses) into laws, possibilities into probabilities, and then into downright certainties.

How are we to account for this? How is it that persons who profess such an ardor for morality are, at bottom, so incurably unmoral? Perhaps, the answer is that morality, in itself, is in sharp antagonism to common honesty—that its one effort is to make true, everywhere and at all times, something that is true only in part and on occasion. The moralist is simply a man who is blind to that fact—one who knows nothing about morality. If he did, he would know that the particular moralic axiom he advocates is as heavy with exceptions as a rule of German grammar—and so he would lose his eagerness to advocate it. In brief, a certain ignorance, or rather stupidity, is essential to the business of moral crusading, and that stupidity reveals itself as an utter inability to distinguish between what is true and what isn’t true.

The anti-tobacco crusaders show this failing to full flower. The actual facts in support of their jehad are very few and not very impressive. It has been proved that the use of tobacco by the young has a tendency to interfere with normal growth; it has been proved again that the excessive use of tobacco by adults works various minor injuries; and it has been proved, finally, that the use of tobacco, in various conditions of disease, on. tends to retard-and even to prevent recovery. Beyond that the evidence does not go. The British Royal Commission appointed to investigate the subject found that the use of tobacco in moderate quantities by a healthy adult had no effect whatever, one way or the other. It did no good and it did no harm. Not the slightest physical difference, organic or functional, separated smokers from non-smokers.

Do the anti-tobacco fanatics present these facts and have done with it? Of course they do not. On the contrary they proceed to the manufacture of an enormous stock of additional “facts,” without the slightest regard for the truth. Because it is notorious that all bad boys smoke cigarettes–just as they turn naturally to all other forbidden things—the argument is launched that cigarette-smoking causes their badness. Because it so happens that most (though by no means all) drinkers also asoke, it is solemnly charged that smoking is the cause of drinking. And because an occasional drinker–perhaps one out of every 20,000—proceeds from alcohol to worse drugs, tobacco is denounced as the advance agent of cocaine and opium.

Such are the laws of logic as applied to the vice of moral crusading. Just as there is a transcendental logic for the private use of psychic researchers, whereby 40 frauds make a fact, so there is a moral logic for the use of moralists, whereby the plain denial of a fact becomes itself a fact. It was by this logic, no doubt, that Dr. Brewer attained to his certainty that the boy who smokes cigarettes at 10 will be a sot at 14 and a drug-fiend at 25.

Advice to school teachers male: throw away your books and join your ward club. Advice to school teachers female: throw away your books and see that your brothers join.