Baltimore Evening Sun (8 January 1912): 6.

The daily thought from “Also Sprach Zarathustra”:

Many a one have I found who strained himself and puffed himself up. And the common people cried: “Behold, there, a great man!” * * * But at last the frog bursteth which puffeth itself up. And the wind escapeth from it.

From a gentleman racked by the sharp colics of righteous indignation:

In your proposed campaign against fakes and fanatics, jackasses and Jeremiahs, kindly count on me. To speak frankly, I am a sucker. I own a suburban home with 10 rooms and must pay $25 a year water rent. My mother-in-law, an estimable lady, owns a city home with 10 rooms—and pays only $11.50. A difference, you see, in the frontage of the two houses. But why should it cost me $13.50 a year? What has the frontage got to do with water? The constitutional provision for uniformity in taxation will not permit the city or State to assess me unfairly, under the head of taxation. But under the head of water rent, which is another form of taxation, I may be descriminated against, according to the ruling of the Princes of Stupidity who invent Baltimore’s schemes for raising revenue. Now, I contend that water rent is taxation, call it by what name you will. Therefore, I contend that our system of water assessment in inequitable, discriminating and unconstitutional. I will be one of 100 owners of wide houses to flatly refuse to pay water rent on the present plan for the year 1912, and if the other 99 will address me through you I will undertake to supply volunteer legal talent to represent the common cause against robbery. We will combine the people against the Revenue Gang and defy the city to turn off our water. If the city does turn off our water, we will go into court and test the case. Now it’s up to the other 99 house owners to join me. Upon the completion of a list of 100 I will address each by mail, notifying them of a place of meeting for organization. For present convenience let the other 99 address me in care of the Free Lance, as WATER RENT.

It is not my habit to receive letters for forwarding—the immoral possibilities of the scheme appall me—but in this case I agree to do so. “Water Rent” sends me his photograph, a certificate of character from his pastor, and a box of sanitary cigars. Obviously, no trifler.

Bill Broening don’t hardly seem to be no more anxious to jug them stuffers than what Al Owens wasn’t.

From the address of Dr. William H. Welch, president of the Horrific Medical Trust, at the annual meeting of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland:

Health is a commodity which can be purchased. If you are willing to pay for it, you can reduce the mortality rate in city and State from 19 to 16 per 1,000 of population per annum. All you need to do is to engage experts.

Another astounding exhibition of the ignorance and obscurantism of the Medical Trust and its chief toreadors. Does Dr. Welch want us to believe that he doesn’t know that the death rate in Baltimore has been reduced? Has he never heard how the Health Department, by the use of the differential calculus, cut it down at one fell swoop from 19.2 to 17.41, and how the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, taking up the benign work, effected a further reduction to 16 flat? Can it be that such great facts have yet to penetrate the guinea pig abattoirs of the Johns Hopkins Medical School? Can it be that Dr. Welch does not read the medical and embalming journals—particularly the Baltimoreishe Blætter of the Honorary Pallbearers?

But, after all, what would you? The Johns Hopkins, as everyone knows, is a citadel of mediævalism, an armed foe to true enlightenment. In the Medical School, despite all the great discoveries of the New Thought, the faculty clings hunkerously to calomel and the knife. The power of Mind is hooted and sneered at; students are purposely kept in ignorance of the great fact that cancer can be cured in 10 days by reading out of a book; the relation between Malicious Animal Magnetism and pediculosis is openly denied and defied; in all that camorra of so-called doctors there is not one who knows how to quench the fires of an incandescent appendix without cutting a trapdoor.

In the university proper things are even worse. It has chairs of English literature, of astro-physics, of Sanskrit and of a multitude of other such fantastic subjects, and yet its syndics resist intransigeantly every suggestion that they establish a chair of boomery. Thus it neglects and scoffa at the dire necessities of the town. We can get along without astro-physicists and orientalists, and without literary critics we are better off than with them; but we do need boomers—need them every hour—need them so badly that we are forced to import them from far places. And yet the university neglects boomery. Send your son there to learn the art—and some functionary will chase him away. Such is the Johns Hopkins University—a bilious enemy to the New Thought, not only in therapeutics, but also in commerce and government.

Fortunately enough, there are heroes among us brave enough to assault its osseous walls. When I say heroes I mean a hero, and when I say a hero I mean, of course, the Hon. Mahoni Amicus, that greater lover of the common people, that daring advocate of democracy undiluted and undisinfected. As yet, true enough, he has made but little progress. Busy with loftier duties—the distribution of jobs, the war upon Sunday novel-reading, the proper banking of city funds, the letting of city docks, the study of the works of Andrew Jackson—he has appeared to neglect the jehad. But let no one forget that one devastating assault is already to his credit, that he has got in at least one staggering lick for us bone-heads. The Johns Hopkins theory that educated men know more about education than uneducated men—where is it today? A corpse in the charnal house of dead delusions! Finney, its champion and incarnation, is no more. The children in the public schools, free from that blight at last, now don’t learn nothing but what will help them when they go to work and go to work later on.

Seven cheap but clean cigars to the Hon. Henry A. McMains, etc., etc., etc.

A framed portrait of Tartuffe to any baltimoralist, lay or clerical, who will come forward with one sound objection to public concerts in Baltimore on Sunday afternoons.

Boil your drinking water. Cover your garbage can. Hide your diamonds when the tax-Mahon comes. Send a wreath to the boomers.

If the money I wisht I had was as safe as the money them ex-Sheriffs went to work an’ collared, then you wouldn’t never hear nothin’ about me settin’ up no niglits worryin’ none.

Only 1,226 days more! Hooray, hooray! Only 1,226 days more! Hooroo, hooroo!