Baltimore Evening Sun (15 January 1912): 6.

For Vice-President of the United States: The Hon. ———ing Harry. —— Additional committeemen: The Hon. Bob Padgett. The Hon. Aristides Goldsborough. The Hon. Bob Lee. The Hon. McCoy McCay. The Hon. Billy Hamilton. The Hon. Dick Scanlon. The Hon. Jack Forster. —— Official Newspaper: THE DAILY HOT TOWEL.

Leading editorial in the Sabbath issue of the Hot Towel:

If the very young men who are criticizing the mention of Mayor Preston’s name for the Presidency or the Vice-Presidency of the United States would read the delailed history of many previous Democratic conventions, they would soon realize that many—yes, a great many—of the successful candidates for the high honor within the gift of their party were placed there by the abuse and ridicule of the very young men of those days.

Well, well, why not name them? Why not name one? A 5-cent package of Honest Motorman to any historian who can do it. Two 5-cent packages to anyone who believes that any historian can do it. Three 5-cent packages to anyone who believes that the Hot Towel author believes that any historian can do it.

Whereupon another keg Of salve is broached:

The name of Dashing Harry is already flashing over the wires throughout the country. . . . Dashing Harry is to became an historic name.

And if not in the history of the United States, then at least in the history of massage.

If Storey really done it, then all I got to say is he done it without knowing he done it.

Concluding remarks on militant moralists, crowded out of this place Saturday:

ulation for enterprise and ardor, to do business at all, must go further afield. That is to say, they must find crimes which the general opinion of mankind holds to be no crimes at all, or invent crimes hitherto unheard of and unimagined. Go back to Puritan New England and you will find the method in full blast. The militant moralists of that time were artists of unparalleled virtuosity. Tihey succeeded in giving a color of felony to innumerable acts of obvious innocence and agreeableness. For instance, they made it a crime for a man to kiss his wife on Sunday, a crime to wear red pulse-warmers, a crime to chew tobacco, a crime to cultivate side whiskers, a crime to call a politician a rascal. These perfectly normal, harmless and even laudable acts were rigorously punished—and so the militant moralists bit nicks in the handles of their pitchforks, and felt that they were clever fellows. Today the trade of militant morality offers fewer triumphs. The world grows resistant, recalcitrant, impatient of moral virtuosi. And yet, here and there, a stroay opportunity for them lies open. No longer able to interfere with our habits of osculation, of free speech and of personal adornment, they yet presume to correct our habits of Sabbath observance, of personal vice, and of divertisement. That is to say, they essay (or at any rate, propose) to punish us for automobiling on Sunday, for smoking cigarettes, for patronizing the theatre, for doing any one of a hundred or more other perfectly harmless and decent things. Into each of these things they try to inject an element of indecency. Their constant effort is to manufacture sins. And so it often becomes necessary to have at them with a corrective syringe of hot carbolic acid or some other suitable weapon, that their efforts may be discouraged and the stench they raise allayed.

I go, let us say, to the performance of a play called “Ghosts,” by Henrik Ibsen, an austere and highly respectable man. I find it entertaining, stitmulating, instructive—a serious presentation of certain very serious facts of daily life. But suddenly some militant moralist, snouting about in the alley behind the theatre, bawls out that it is obscene. Very well: let him bawl. I stick to my view that it isn’t. But he denounces me as a scoundrel for defending it. Very well; let him denounce. His opinion of me does not interest me. But, going further, he sends for a catchpoll, accuses the author and actors of public indecency—a very real offense—orders the house closed, and throws me into the street. Aha! Now I begin to feel my rights invaded! Now I begin to take notice. That is to say, now I apply my boot to the pantaloons of the moralist, fling my fists into his face, push him down a sewer—and then take a necessary bath. I have been outraged, insulted, injured. My common rights as a civilized white man have been invaded. And I offer the very same opposition to that invasion—no more and no less—that I would offer if some thief tried to invade my right to the jeweled fraternal order emblem I wear at my equator.

Such is the militant moralist—an enemy to public order, a fellow dangerous to us all. Such is chemical purity, that curse of civilization. I have no quarrel, of course, with virtue. I am myself extremely virtuous—almost, indeed, an ascetic—the common butt of acquaintances of looser habit. But I am not blind to the fact that virtue, of all the vices, is the one most to be distrusted, for it, of them all, leads quickest to hopeless debauchery. A drunkard may be cured by inducing him to use opium, a Sunday novel reader may be saved by drink, a tenor who sings through his nose will sing through his mouth after his adenoids have been cut out—but a chemical purist is utterly incurable. One may do nothing to him or for him or about him save knock him in the head and pity him.

Now that all that bunk about juggin’ stuffers has been shet up, the thing to do is to be a little more carefuller at the next election.

Affecting dialogue in the barroom of the Rennert:

Reporter—What do you think of the nomination of the super-Mahon for the Vice-Presidency? The Hon. John J. Mahon—Nothing in the world could be too d——d good for him.

Nor, for that matter, too d——d preposterous or too d——d brazen.

Exultant chorus of the delivered ballet-box stuffers:

Trust John Mahon—and nothing won’t never happen to you!

Every year the taxpayers of Baltimore are robbed of $1,100.000 by the extortionate and indecent tax laws of Maryland. If that money were saved by fair laws, here is how it might be spent:

$100,000 of it might pay the normal deficit of an orchestra of 80 men, giving 50 first-class concerts a year. $100,000 of it might pay the normal deficit of an opera company giving 25 performances of grand opera. $100,000 of it might pay for the upkeep of a first-class public art gallery. $100,000 of it might convert the Enoch Pratt Free Library into the best circulating library in the United States. $100,000 of it might pay for the care of 250 pauper consumptives, white and black, and so relieve the well of their menace. $100,000 of it a year, for these years, might stamp out typhoid absolutely, and save the community an annual loss of at least $2,000,000. And the remaining $500,000, if no better use for it appeared, might reduce the tax rate 15 cents.

From Democracy to democracy, and from democracy to anemocracy, and from anemocracy to osseocaputocracy, and from osseocaputocracy to porcocracy.