Baltimore Evening Sun (11 January 1912): 6.

The daily thought from “Also sprach Zarathustra”:

Wherever the rabble drinks, wells are poisoned.

Incidental to the rejoicing over the victory at Washington, it may be noted sadly that the spring crop of Prominent Baltimoreans promises to be unusually large.

A plug hat to the Hon. Jake Hook for any evidence leading to the reasonable belief that the merit system will force the Hon. the super-Mahon to appoint a niggero City Collector.

The highest duties of every Baltimorean, to his family and to himself:

1. To violate the Blue Laws.

2. To dodge taxes.

When you go to work and pay a guy $5 a day to check hats it don’t hardly seem like you couldn’t say nothing about savin’ money none.

A brief note from one eager to do exact justice:

Isn’t it unfair to condemn the Health Department out of hand for what, after all, are minor pecadillos? Let us admit that it juggles the death returns. Let us admit that it entertained “Sonny” Mahon. But isn’t it also true that it does a lot of very good work? Doesn’t it give us genuine protection against smallpox, for example? And hasn’t it given intelligent and industrious aid in the anti-tuberculosis campaign?

It is a pleasure to admit these services, and many others as valuable. The Baltimore Health Department has more than one excellent man in it—more than one man who combines professional skill and intelligence with a high degree of enthusiasm. Hampered constantly by a shortage of funds and by the interference of political wire-pullers, it has yet done splendid work in the past, and is doing splendid work today. No other city department, I believe, can show a higher general level of efficiency. None other can show so many men who are willing to sacrifice their own time and convenience to the public welfare.

But one thing it lacks, at least, in its present incarnation, and that is the very quality of courage. Instead of telling the truth, briefly and straightforwardly, it prefers to temporize and apologize. Instead of attacking, constantly and valiantly, the stupidity represented, let us say, by the City Council, it prefers to yield to that stupidity. Instead of resisting, as an indecent invasion, the nefarious job-juggling of professional politicians, it prefers to submit to that juggling, and even, it would seem, to approve it.

The Health Department, it must be remembered, is no mere bunch of political roustabouts, nor can it descend, without giving offense, to the ethics of such roustabouts. Devoted to labors requiring professional skill and conscience, it must hold to those ideals which separate the professions from the mere trades. It must subscribe collectively, in brief, to that code of professional honor to which its principal members undoubtedly subscribe individually. And that code, if I make no mistake, resolutely forbids the sophistication of facts, however disagreeable, and as resolutely forbids the sacrifice of personal dignity to personal advantage.

Altogether an unfortunate series of episodes. But as the correspondent above quoted argues, they should not make us forget the good work the Health Department has done and is doing.

Nobody don’t hear nothing no more about getting the dots on none of them repeaters no more.

From “A Manual of Mental Science,” by Leander Edmund Whipple, an eminent rabble-rouser of the New Thought:

Reality is the fundamental whole—All within itself. Principle is the active factor in all Reality. The following are the True Principles of Being and Activity. All are Spiritual—Fundamental Real.

To Be To Do
Being— principle of Life
Life— “ ” Activity
Activity— “ ” Action
Action—Doing;
the Will to Do— “ ” Creation
Consciousness— “ ” Intelligence
Intelligence— “ ” Understanding
Understanding— “ ” Purpose
Purpose— “ ” Power
Power— “ ” Production

The above are all considered as Fundamental Principles, in the true Metaphysical philosophy. They are the accepted Principles of Mental Science.

Can you imagine sillier balderdash? Can you imagine a series of words with less intelligible meaning in them? And yet it is upon just such verbal meringues and cream puffs that New Thoughters feed. And it is by dishing up just such gaseous victuals that New Thought wizards live and have their being.

The betting odds in the downtown taverns, as reported by my todsaeufer:

3,000 to 1 that them Legislaturemen won’t never fall for no merit system bunk. 200 to 1 that Harry Preston is elected Governor in 1914.

Space offered to the Hon. Henry A. McMains, D. O., to print his list of undoubted M. D.’s who belong to the League for Medical “Freedom,” Maryland Branch:

There remains the dispute among the five warring lodges of boomers as to which snared the Democratic National Convention.

Only 1,223 days more! The moving finger writes! Only 1,223 days more! And having writ——!

Boil your drinking water! Dodge the tax-Mahon! Send your money to the boomers! Don’t swear at the frozen pipes!

A mental healer is ono who “proves” that his patient’s colic is imaginary, but admits that his money is real.

From “The Revolutionists’ Handbook,” by George Bernard Shaw:

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Meanwhile, in some forgotten pigeon-hole of the courthouse, the case against the ex-Sheriffs accumulates cobwebs and interest. Let us all hope, with the highest respect, that the gentlemen of the bench will grow more fluent in ratiocination after they get their promised raise.