Baltimore Evening Sun (10 February 1912): 6.

Open letter to the Greater Baltimore Committee:

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember, and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts * * * There’s fennel for you, and columbines * * * There’s rue for you * * *

The standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League, as given in the current number of the Public Health Reports:

Pittsburgh.......................... 750 Cleveland........................ 357
Baltimore.......................... 717 New York....................... 126
Philadelphia...................... 709 Chicago........................... 091
Boston............................... 448 St. Louis.......................... 000

What! Have the Orioles gone stale? After winning the 1911 pennant hands down, are they now to lose the 1912 pennant to unspeakable Pittsburgh? It cannot, must not be!

Don’t go getting worried. Nothing won’t happen to Murray. Nothing won’t happen to no staffers. Nothing won’t happen to no ex-Sheriffs. Nothing won’t happen to nobody.

From the Mahons, the super-Mahoms, the sub-Mahons, the pseudo-Mahons, the quasi- Mahons and the vice-Mahons—good Lord, deliver us!

The merit system in the Paving Commission? Oh, har, har, har! Oh, haw, haw, haw! Oh, hee, hee, hee!

The major excommunication ferendae sententiae and the anathema marantha of all good citizens upon any scoundrel or traitor who will not publicly admit that the Legislature of Maryland is a sanhedrin of pure and exalted spirits, whose integrity stops little short of the pathological and whose sapience rivals that of a herd of middle-aged serpents.

The satanic Anderson, camerleugo of the Anti-Saloon League, has emerged triumphant from one more rough-house with a politician. This time it is the Hon. James McC. Trippe, Speaker of the House of Delegates, who bears the marks of his teeth. Trippe, of course, doesn’t know it. Carried away by the reverberations of his own roaring, he is convinced, no doubt, that he has disposed of Anderson. But the truth is that Anderson has put him exactly where he wanted to put him. A week ago it was still possible for the Hon. Mr. Trippe to pretend to a lofty impartiality, a judicial calm. Today any such pretension would make a horse laugh. His number is plainly visible. Anderson has achieved his goal.

Personally I grieve to behold such doings, for I am a violent and incurable friend to alcoholism, in all its lovely forms, and nothing would please me more than to hear of the collapse of the Anti-Saloon League. But as a connoisseur of sophistry aud bellowing, I am forced to admit and admire the quite extraordinary virtuosity of the Hon. Mr. Anderson. Whenever he comes into fair conflict with some champion of the politicians and saloonkeepers, his victory is so easy that it touches the borders of the shameful. One thinks of a grown man beating a child to death, of a jaguar chasing a crippled streptococcus. With all of the facts against him and usually with a hostile audience judging him, he yet wins on logic, on paralogy and on dialectic technique. He has, to date, out-argued all of the bravos sent against him, and not only out- argued them, but also kicked them in the pantaloons, walloped them with bladders and put them to flight.

The easy superiority of the man is constantly shown by the manner in which his opponents engage him. Instead of standing up before his somewhat dubious statistics and meeting argument with argument and “fact” with fact, they invariably take alarm at his first salvo and thereafter confine themselves to calling him names. He is, I believe, the most-denounced man ever resident in Baltimore. I have heard him called every nasty thing under the sun, from liar to caitiff. I have heard him accused of every crime imaginable, from the forgery of documents to the throwing of bombs. More than once it has been solemnly proposed, usually by liquorish ward heelers, that he be run out of town. He is the vampire and hobgoblin of every bartender’s nightmare.

And yet it must be plain to any sane man that such abuse is not argument, and that, even if there be truth in it, the truth thus visible has got nothing to do with the justice or injustice of the Anti-Saloon League’s jehad. For politicians to attack a man on the ground that he is not altogether sincere or on the ground that his private character is not above reproach—this is certainly a jocosity sufficiently amusing to make the dead rise from their tombs and guffaw! And not only is it amusing, but it is also essentially bogus, idiotic and unconvincing. The doctrines maintained by Anderson, or by any other man, must stand or fall by their own inherent merit, and not at all by the virtue of their champion. To dismiss the theory of local option on the ground that Anderson does not believe in it himself, but is merely hired to support it, is just as sensible as to attack the law against murder on the ground that the average policeman, on arresting a murderer, is honestly sorry for the fellow.

My own belief is that the Hon. Mr. Anderson is perfectly sincere—that if he wasn’t at the start he has converted himself since. That belief rests squarely upon the obvious joy he gets out of his work. He delights in toying with his opponents, in first letting them run away with the line and then tearing out their guts. Thus with the lamented Trippe. First, he irritated that great statesman, scientifically and diabolically, and then, when Trippe suddenly went into irruption, and began bawling like 10,000 lions and hopping up and down like a hen on a stovelid, and so lost his diaphanous vestments of judicial impartiality, and stood forth, as it were, in the political altogether—then Anderson turned away from the scene and was shaken by his own snickers.

An affecting spectacle! A clever fellow! My advice to the saloonkeepers is that they imitate the Anti-Saloon League and send to distant climes for some super-Anderson. All the local wizards they have hitherto employed are now in horizontal contact with the mat. The Anti- Saloon League, I believe, is made up largely of professional moralists, which class I hold in utter abomination, and most of its doctrines seem to me to be absurd to the verge of lunacy—but it is patently better to have a bad suit and a good advocate than a good suit and a whole herd of mere bawlers.

Only 1,193 days more! But time enough to fill the jails with Sunday novel-readers!

The daily thought from “Also sprach Zarathustra”:

It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Mourn the Boom with piteous lamentations! Help Harry! Swat the fly!