Baltimore Evening Sun (24 November 1911): 6.

The Hon. Thomas G. Boggs, secretary of the estimable Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association and a literary scorpion of considerable talent, devotes a page in the current issue of Baltimore, the monthly organ of the association, to the polite business of calling me a disseminator of untruth (i.e., a liar) and a reviler of sapience (i.e., an ass). Far be it from me to deny the charge: if the first part of it is not true, then the second part of it must be true. But to the evidence, as opposed to the charge, I am compelled to enter many demurrers. In brief, the Hon. Mr. Boggs does not prove his case, however much the probabilities may support him, and neither do the professional paralogists he has summoned to his aid.

Well, well, what is it all about? Let me rehearse briefly the admitted facts. Last summer, in the pursuit of his boomiferous duties, the Hon. Mr. Boggs issued a folder bearing the title of “Baltimore: a Brief Budget for the Busy Bee, by Boggs,” and on the second page of that folder printed the following sentence:

The present mortality rate [in Baltimore] is 16 per 1,000 of population per annum.

Amazed by this nonsense, I at once offered, by public outcry, to give the Hon. Mr. Boggs a can of sardines if he could prove the truth of his figures. Going further, I offered to give him a similar can of sardines it he could prove that the death rate in Baltimore was, or ever had been, less than 18 per 1,000 per annum. His cupidity excited by these offers, he rushed to the Health Department for affidavits, and there he got what he wanted. The department’s report for 1910, then lately issued, showed that the official death rate during that year was but 17.41 per 1,000. This report the Hon. Mr. Boggs flung at my head, hoping thus to cabbage the one can of sardines, if not the other.

Unluckily, I was not impressed by the document. I had read such light literature before. I was and am, in fact, a specialist in the matter of Health Department mathematics. And so, on October 27, and in this place, I showed that the romantic departmental death rate of 17.41 was arrived at, not by dividing the number of deaths during 1910 by the actual population of Baltimore, but by dividing the number of deaths by a purely theoretical and grotesquely impossible “estimated” population. In brief, the Health Department “assumed” that the city of Baltimore had 589,000 people on July 1, 1910, whereas the Federal census at June, 1910, showed it to have but 558,485, and the police census of November 1, made under orders to count in every possible inhabitant, showed it to have but 573,097. Worked out accurately, these figures gave a death rate for 1910, not of 17.41, but of 18.83!

But did this fact flabbergast and silence the Hon. Mr. Boggs? Not at all. It merely sent him rushing back to the Heath Department for more figures. These figures he naïvely prints in the current issue of Baltimore. They show, as plain as day, that I was right. They show, in the first place, that the “estimated” population of 589,000 was grossly excessive. They show, in the second place, that the Health Department was well aware of it. And they show, in the third place, that the death rate in Baltimore during 1910, counting out all deaths of non-residents and allowing for all possible errors in the most liberal manner, was fully 18.33 per 1,000 of population.

The name of Dr. James Bosley, commissioner of Health, is signed to the official document offered in evidence by the Hon. Mr. Boggs. Dr. Bosley explains frankly how the “estimated” population of 589,000 was determined. Between 1890 and 1900, he says, the population of Baltimore, according to the Federal census, increased 74,558, or at the rate, roughly speaking, of 7,500 a year. Accordingly, beginning with 1901, the Health Department mathematicians added 7,500 to the population each year, down to and including 1904. In 1905 they began adding 8,000, on the theory that the annual increase was probably itself increasing. Thus, in 1910, they reached an estimated population of 589,000.

So far, so good. That estimate was grossly excessive, for the simple reason that the population of Baltimore increased much less between 1900 and 1910 than between 1890 and 1900, but all the same there were reasonable grounds, down to the census of 1910, for making it. But what we are concerned with here is not the estimated population of Baltimore but the actual populatiom, not the theoretical death rate but the actual death rate. Why did the Health Department cling to its estimated population of 589,000 after the actual population in 1910 had been officially determined? Why did it announce a death rate of 17.41 when it knew very well that the actual death rate was at least 18.33—as it now openly admits? And why did the Hon. Mr. Boggs defend those false figures after I had carefully demonstrated their falsity?

Dr. Bosley’s excuse, in his letter to the Hon. Mr. Boggs, dated November 1 of this year, Is that “it was but last Monday that the Federal official report reached this office.” “Last Monday” was October 30, 1911. And yet the Federal census returns for Baltimore were printed in The Sun on September 23, 1910, more than 13 months before “last Monday,” and the returns of the police census of November, 1910, were printed in The Sun before December 1! What is more, these returns were perfectly familiar to the Health Department statisticians when the report for 1910 was prepared, for on the very first page of that report they are mentioned twice!

Could the deliberate juggling of figurees be bolder or go further? Does the Hon. Mr. Boggs stand up in meeting and defend any such cold-blooded assault upon the plain facts? Does he hold that a report full of gross errors should be accepted as gospel truth, even after those errors have been detected, exposed and admitted? Does he subscribe to the doctrine that it is the bounden duty of the municipal departments not to tell the truth about Baltimore, but to manufacture agreeable fictions–fictions calculated to help the puerile business of boomery? I rather suspact that he does. It is a doctrine held almost universally by boomers. And it is usually accompanied, I have found, by the corollary doctrine that whoever dissents from it–whoever tries to get at the truth, however unplesant—whoever seeks to remedy evils by pointing them out–is a marplot, a bad citizen and a scoundrel.

The Hon. Mr. Boggs himself is not above discreetly modifying his own figures. For example, in his Baltimore article, he says that his original statement regarding the death rate was that it “runs from 16 to 18 per 1,000 of population.” What he actually said was–but more of this anon.