Baltimore Evening Sun (11 September 1911): 6.

Now that the School Board has been cleared of its despots, its professional martyrs and its theorists, the way is open for the reorganization of the public schools in a common sense fashion. Let it be hoped that the new board will give immediate attention to that most pressing problem, the reform of the curriculum. And let it be hoped further that it will begin by attacking that most ridiculous fad of the Van Sickle camorra, to wit, the teaching of English. Why should little children be tortured with the grammatical subtleties and grotesqueries of that abominable and foreign tongue? In their homes they must speak, not English, but American, and that is the language they will have to use in their daily work all the rest of their lives. Why not teach it to them frankly and without shame? Why fillthem with theories which can lead to no possible application? Why teach them, against all reason, that “I shall go, “ I did” and “Those are hers” are correct, when they know very well, and their parents know, and all their fellow pupils know, that the proper, lawful and honestly American forms are “I will go,” “I done” and “Them are hern?”

Certainly that foolishness has gone on long enough. While the schools were in the hands of pedants, while Johns Hopkins men were in the saddle and the business of supervision was conducted in the recondite dialect of bachelors of arts, it was vain, of course, to look for reforms. But now that the schools have been rescued from these toreadors of useless learning, and are once more in the hands of the common people, like the police force and the department of street cleaning, why not make a clean and instant sweep? The school teacher who speaks English can have no place in the reorganized schools. The school teacher who teaches English should be pistoled on the spot.

From the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society, that militant band:

Your charge of inaccuracy in our quotation from Burns, though a side issue (to the main discussion in which we have been engaged) is not a minor one. If you will read “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” by Robert Burns, or, not caring to read the whole poem, will turn to the third and fourth lines of the third stanza from the close, you will find the lines we quoted and exactly as quoted in our letter. Pope’s lines, which you perhaps have in mind, are:

A wit’s a feather, and a chief a rod; An honest man’s the noblest work of God.

Burns, in borrowing the last line, acknowledged by quotation marks his indebtedness to another. You should have observed that by the correct use of quotation marks, which you failed in your reprint to show, we acknowledged the quotation within the quotation. We trust that you do not need to have your attention called to the mangled form of the lines as printed in The Evening Sun, where, by the omission of an “s” in the first line and by the substitution of the conjunction “and” for the article “an” at the beginning of the second line, the rhythm and the sense are lost. We ask that you do not “let this pass,” and we expect you to make your apology as ample, as emphatic and as public as you have made your false charge of inaccuracy, with its implied slur on the character of anti-vivisectionists.

On receiving this polite protest I at once referred it to a literary gentleman of my acquaintance, a man who reads poetry as copiously as most men read the sporting page, and from him I have just received the following disconcerting note:

Dear Hen—You had better take to the woods. They have got you with the goods. The quotation of the anti-vivisectionists, in its original form, must have been perfectly accurate. You will find the passage in the nineteenth stanza of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” as follows:

From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs, That makes her loved at home, revered abroad; Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, “An honest man’s the noblest work of God!”

Burns took the last line from “An Essay on Man” and gave credit for it. The line preceding embodies an idea also to be found in “An Essay on Man”—in the line “What’s fame? A fancied life in others’ breath”—but here Burns did not quote directly. The same idea is to be found in lines 53 and 54 of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village,” as follows:

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade: A breath can make them as a breath has made.

Did Burns steal from Goldsmith? “The Deserted Village” was published in 1770, when Burns was but 11 years old. “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” was not written until 1783. Or did both steal from Pope? “An Essay on Man” goes back to the period 1731-38. An interesting critical question—but not one for you, dear fellow, to discuss. The business actually before you is that of making an escape with your hide. Why don’t you blame it on the printer?

Let me be perfectly frank. If it were possible I should certainly follow an ancient and honorable custom and blame it on the printers, but—save in the matter of those typographical errors—it isn’t. Therefore, I am reduced to the horrible necessity of apologising—amply, publicly and emphatically. As for the amplitude of that apology, let it be recalled that the cause of offense was a five-line paragraph to agate type, the smallest used by The Evening Sun, while here I use, not only agate, but also nonpareil, and brevier, and spread the thing over half a column. And as for its publicity, let the fact stick out that the half column thus used in worth 25 cents a line, agate measure. And as for the emphasis of it, let me assure the anti-vivisectionists that I am ready to add (and am actually adding, pianissimo) ten thousand hearty damns. Ten thousand? Nay! Fifty thousand!

In brief, I acknowledge publicly, amply and emphatically that the Maryland Anti- Vivisection Society is a synod of impeccable authority when it comes to poetry. Compared to it I am a rank amateur, a scandalous ignoramus. But I still protest, and with all due respect, that it violates the laws of evidence when it puts poets on the stand as expert witnesses in a purely scientific suit and offers the absurd prose doggerel of its Ferriers and Kingsfords, its Drs. Balderdash and its Professors Flapdoodle, in rebuttal of the testimony of such competent and conscientious men as Drs. Flexnier, Osler, Keen and Ehrlich. On matters of prosody I shall take good care to rile it no more. But when it comes to medical research, I continue to annoy it with ribald guffaws, and here renew my suggestion that it either answer my plain questions, honestly and without evasion, or admit that it has no answers to make.