Baltimore Evening Sun (14 December 1911): 6.

Only 1,251 days more! Lest the waters of lethe engulf us and we forget!

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Thank the Lord for the smoke! Watch the Narrenverein! Swat the fly!

VOX POPULI

It wouldn’t hardly surprise nobody hardly none if them stuffers was to go to work and die of old age before they ever get sent to no jail.

Complaint from one with a genuine and affecting grievance:

I ask space to protest against the action of the police in closing all kaifs last Saturday night exactly at midnight, without a moment’s notice to anyone. I admit their right to close the kaifs at that hour, but I dispute their right to do so without notice. Whatever the law may say, it has long been the custom in Baltimore for many kaifs to remain open until 2 or 3 o’clock Sunday morning. The drinking classes have grown accustomed to that hour of closing; they have adapted their habits to it; they have attained, I should say, to a sort of vested right to it. Custom, I submit, is stronger than law. The police cannot, without notice, change the conditions of life in Baltimore. If they want to close all kaifs at midnight, they have a right, perhaps, to do so, but they should certainly give notice of their intention by advertisement in the papers, and so afford due warning to all drinkers, that the latter may speed up accordingly. Am I right? A Drinking Man.

Whether this complaint is technically right or wrong I don’t know, but, right or wrong, I am with him, as every humane man must be. It is all well enough to argue that the right to drink after midnight is not guaranteed by law, and that in cousequence no tort is committed when it is invaded, but that, it must be apparent, is a mere quibble, and worthy only of lawyers. Appealing from the quibble to the facts, we find that the right to drink after midnight on Saturday nights has been exercised by thousands of Baltimoreans for many years, that it affords them their only practical means of getting through Sunday without conscious suffering, and that its sudden withdrawal, in consequence, disarranges their routine and endangers their health.

Have the police, then, any right to abrogate that right, suddenly and without notice? I think not. Once they have formally repealed a law, in the exercise of their admitted prerogative, they enter into what may be regarded as contractual relations with chronic violators of that law, and it is not competent for them, without due notice to the parties of the second part, to repudiate and annul that contract. In brief, they may repeal laws at their will (they do so, in fact, incessantly and as a were matter of routine), but they cannot make laws without giving the victims of those laws a chance to protest, or at least a chance to get away.

It is all well enough to denounce the Saturday night drinker as a criminal and to say that he deserves to be driven home. But our laws and customs forbid any such summary disposition of him. Even if he be a criminal, he still has his right to a fair trial, and that right involves, of course, the right to hear the accusation against him, to consult counsel, to have a reasonable opportunity to prepare his defense, and to face his accusers in open court. All these rights are denied him when his drinking-room is suddenly raided, his ministering bartender jugged. and he himself thrown into the street.

Morever, the custom of drinking until 2 to 3 o’clock Sunday morning is so ancient and so widely practiced in Baltimore that it seems absurd to denounce it as criminal. As William Burke said, one cannot indict a whole people--nor even, for that matter, a whole class. I do not defend drinking. Personally, I am a rigid teetotaler, an ascetic, almost a fanatic. But I am not silly enough to deny the obvious fact that the ingestion of alcohol, to the mahority of civilized white men, is an intensely agreeable act, and that to thousands of Baltimoreans, condemned to live under our Blue Laws, its practice on Saturday nights is the only available means of prophylaxis against the distressing psychic experience of spending a Baltimore Sunday in the full posession of ene’s faculties. Men who adopt this means may be ignorant, they may adopt a preventive that is worse than the disease, they may display a distressing lack of resourcefulness and imagination--but it is certainly absurd to argue that they are criminals. Self-protection is no sign of criminality. It is not a felony to take an anæsthetic before having one’s appendix extracted.

Suggestion for a sticker to be prepared by the Greater Baltimore Committee and supplied free to all patriots who will agree to put it on their letters:

Baltimore, 19.2

From one with a keen and laudable sense of justice:

Certainly you must be wrong about the City Council. I know at least four Councilmen who are intelligent.

Don’t boast, good friend! I myself know six. But the total membership of the Council is 33, and so 6 is not a majority. Perhaps there may be 7, or even 8. But take care to send in your evidence with your allegation. It is no light thing to accuse a City Councilman of being intelligent.

The election of the Hon. Harry W. Nice to the Hon. the Sob Squad is officially gazetted. The Hon. Mr. Nice was elected on motion of the Hon. Maboni Amicus, founder and poriferus-superior of the Order. The ceremony of installation will take place in the main bagging room, at the Southwestern Police Station, tomorrow morning at 10.30. In preparation therefor a corps of prominent plumbers is now engaged in covering the floor with zinc. At the moment the large, tear-shaped pearl, the insignia of the order, is pinned to the candidate’s bosom, a saturated sponge will be dropped from the battlements of the station house as a signal to the circumambient peasantry.

The Hon. Henry Joesting, Jr., at yesterday’s meeting of the Old-Fashioned School Board: This is a bad precedent. Miss W-------- should not receive preference because she has friends on the board. I am bitterly opposed to it.

What has come over the Hon. Mr. Joesting? Doesn’t he know very well that, under the present system, the first of all desiderata is to have friends on the board? Every other test has been abolished. If, now, that test, too, is abolished, what test will remain?

Three good 5-cent cigars to the Hon. Henry J. McMains for each and every name of an allopath in good standing who belongs to the League for Medical “Freedom,” Maryland Branch.