Baltimore Evening Sun (12 February 1912): 6.

Proposed design for a campaign button to be worn by the Harry Committee of ward-heelers, job-holders, Prominent Baltimoreans, honest numskulls and good-natured perfumers:

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The betting odds in the downtown drinking rooms, as reported by my circulating lushers: 100 to 1 that McCay-McCoy is kidding about that merit system. 1000 to 1 that Jake gets in line again. 1,000,000 to 1 that Bob gets treated royal.

If the business of hanging felons at the city jail interferes with work in the shops, and if, as Mr. Weyler argues, it would cause too much excitement in the penitentiary, then why not buy the old Monumental Theatre for the purpose and so give the common people a chance to enjoy the sport? The Monumental, true enough, seats but 2,500, and there probably would be 10,000 applications for tickets to each hanging, but that difficulty could be got around by distributing the 2,500 tickets among the ward and precinct executives and letting them sell them to the highest bidders. Some such scheme probably will be adopted during the coming Democratic National Convention. It is simple, effective and profitable.

Better still, why not have hangings in the open air—say, at one of the children’s playgrounds? As everyone knows, the theory behind capital punishment is that it deters the possible evildoer of tomorrow. Well, the school children of today are the possible evildoers of tomorrow. Let a boy of 10 or 12 years see a man hanged, and the memory of it will stick to him, day and night, for at least 60 years, and so he will be immune, for that period, to homicidal mania. In addition, the spectacle will make him proud of his country and his fellow-men, and thus increase his general value as a citizen.

At most of the playgrounds there are swings which might be converted, at very slight expense, into gibbets. No need to construct the clumsy traps whose fall is always described with such eloquence by the newspaper reporters who report hangings in jail-yards. Just put the felon in an ash-cart, drive him beneath the swing, encircle his larynx with the fatal noose—and then remove the cart. At once he will begin his last and most spirited fandango, to the delight and edification of the assembled young.

A sport, of course, suitable only for open weather. But that is no obstacle. The felon condemned in January, you may be sure, will not object to waiting until the June following, nor even until the June of the next year. Murderers have patience; it is a trait essential to their art. That one who bawls to be hanged at once is so rare that he may be accurately represented by the mathematical sign of minus infinity.

It might be convenient, indeed, to save up all murderers until July 1 and then hang them simultaneously and at different playgrounds. What more agreeable and salubrious method of celebrating the day? What more impressive demonstration of the high degree of civilization to which this great republic has attained? To take a fellow-man out and choke him to death—to lock him up in a narrov cell for weeks and months in advance, that he may think of his fate and picture it and wallow in the joy of it—here, assuredly, we have a business which testifies eloquently to the honor and glory of a Christian people!

Dithyrambs from the new tragedy, “The Osseocaputs”:

Semi-Chorus—Are those them? Chorus—Yes; them are those!

Some kind friend importunes me to enroll myself as a student in the Weltmer Institute of Suggestive Therapeutics at Nevada, Mo., and so qualify myself for high office in the League for Medical “Freedom,” that camorra of trans-Ehrlichs and super-Welches. According to the prospectus sent to me, the Weltmer Institute is “the parent school of suggestive therapeutics and the school which has fought for and secured legal recognition. It is headquarters. It is to suggestive therapeutics what Oxford is to medicine.” Going further, I learn that suggestive therapeutics is now one of the most profitable grafts known to connoisseurs. Profits lure and beckon like the Lorelei: “17,600 Americans now patronize drugless and knifeless healing.”

The course at the institute is divided into 40 sections and 102 lessons, which works out to 2.55 lessons a section. “With diagram quiz and title pages,” the textbook in use bulges to 1,000 pages folio. “By devoting two hours as day to the study, the whole course may be completed in 15 weeks.” Just 15 weeks to convert an ignorant journalist into an abyss of anatomy and physiology, a Matterhorn of therapeutics and obstetrics, a virtuoso of the sub-conscious—in brief, into a master fit to rank with the horse doctors and she novelists of the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society, not to say with the gaseous allopaths of the Hon. Mr. McMain’s walhalla!

But what are the subjects taught in this great university, this Oxford of suggestive therapeutics, this Goettingen of psychotherapy, this Toulouse of bunk? Thus the prospectus describes some of the sections:

Section 3—To find the Philosopher’s Stone. Section 4—To master sensation. Section 11—To absorb without effort. Section 25—To place all hearing power at your command. Section 26—To know just where and how a nerve may be stimulated. Section 28—To solve the problem of creation.

No need to go further with the advertisement of this incomparable school. To find the philosopher’s stone, and solve the problem of creation, all by correspondence and in 15 weeks—here alone is your money’s worth. And, in addition, you will learn how to “diagnose all abnormal conditions,” which is more than Dr. Osler can do, and to “control the thoughts of others,” which is more than the Hon. Mr. McMains Himself can do. Send your money to the cashier at Nevada, Mo. The way to medical “freedom” lies open before you. You are a sucker if you lose this chance to beat the Medical Trust.