Baltimore Evening Sun (9 July 1912): 6.

The valiant Sunhounds of the City Council got a long-awaited chance to bark and show their teeth last night, when some complaisant member introduced a resolution heaping lavish praises upon the Sunpaper for helping to bring the Democratic National Convention to Baltimore—an enterprise considerably richer in good intentions than in actual profits. According to the estimable Hot Towel of this morning a bellow went up at once, and before the resolution could be jammed through it had to be so amended as to include mention of the Towel itself, the Evening Serviette, the licentious Evening Sun and the cervine and rambunctious Evening News. Even then a number of ward-club Wallensteins voted against it, and more than one openly denounced it, in shrill and shaky American.

A piece of low comedy reflecting little credit upon any member of the troupe. There should be a provision in the City Charter prohibiting such cheap and hollow mountebankery. It is no part of the City Council’s duty to pass resolutions praising the doings of newspapers, or to occupy its time in any other manner with their enterprises—and it is certainly no honor to a newspaper of common self-respect to be praised by the City Council. And yet such silly resolutions are constantly bobbing up, and as constantly making rows. They are dubious in origin, grotesque in history and laughable in effect. If there can be any difference between two things so wholly questionable as the motives of the men who father them and the motives of the men who attack them, that difference is probably in favor of the latter.

Which recalls the fact that the Evening Serviette has yet to offer any evidence that its “letters to the editor” of a few days ago, accusing the Sunpaper of keeping visitors away from the convention, were genuine. I myself have so little faith that they were that I proceed to the direct and public accusation that they were not. My belief is that all of those letters were written in the Serviette office by regular members of the staff, and I shall cling huukerously to that belief and occasionally give it voice until some member of the said staff, over his signature and on his personal word of honor, gives assurances that they were not.

Gen. Colorado Maduro, the Cuban leader who was recently captured by insurgents in Pinar del Rio, has been ransomed by Col. Jacobus Hook at a cost of $16,000 gold, and will be placed in charge of the Colonel’s new private cigar factory at Mantanzas, with the rank and pay of a brigadier-general of cavalry.—Adv.

Some anonymous suffragette attempts to hack me to death in the Sunpaper of this morning by alleging that I hate babies, that I am “a victim of the dread disease known as babyopbobia” and that “the mere sight of a baby” puts me “in a muddle.” Why lie? I admit it. Going further, I admit that I have long advocated the segregation of all babies upon remote and well-guarded farms from birth until the age of 3 years. If that be criminal, make the most o’t.

But even so, I hold that I am considerably more humane and hospitable to babies than the suffragettes themselves. Say what you will against me, mesdames, you cannot charge that I have ever entered an innocent infant of mine in a public show, there to be gaped at by the vulgar, and prodded by the critical, and devoured by flies, and kept awake against its will, and deprived of regular nourishment, and oppressed by gaudy garments, and tortured by the rhetoric of the Hon. Bob Lee, and fried in the hot sun, and otherwise wounded and outraged in its digestion and its self-respect. Call me a brute—say that I hate babies—but don’t dare charge that I have ever sacrificed the protesting but helpless young to my own vainglory or to the hazards and exigencies of political controversy. There, at least, my conscience is clear.

The ease with which typhoid fever can be combatted, provided only intelligent and energetic men have the business in hand, has been lately demonstrated anew at Memphis, Tenn. Mississippi floods of the early spring invaded the water supply at Memphis, pouring the sewage of a hundred towns into the mains, and the result was a sudden and alarming outbreak of typhoid. In a short while new cases were being reported at the rate of from 10 to 15 a day, which rate, comparing the population of Memphis to that of Baltimore, was equal to a rate of from 44 to 70 a day here.

Then it was that the local health department awoke to the full seriousness of the situation, and at once remedial measures were got under way. On the one hand immediate efforts were made to stop the pollution of this water supply, and on the other hand a large stock of typhoid vaccine was laid in and all citizens who applied were vaccinated free of charge. The people of Memphis responded promptly. Within a few weeks 15,000 persons had been vaccinated at the public expense and 10,000 at their own expense. In six weeks the epidemic was over.

The preliminary report of the health department shows that the vaccine was of enormous efficiency. Despite the fact that its administration was not begun until thousands of persons had been exposed to the disease and the further fact that the majority of those vaccinated continued to be exposed between the first and final doses, it cut down the case rate and death rate from the start. Very few of the persons who were vaccinated contracted the disease later on, and in these few cases “the violence of the attack was minimized.”

Thus Memphis has suddenly become a poor field for medical freedomists, anti- vaccinationists and other such ignorant and bellowing foes of scientific medicine. The people there have witnessed an impressive exhibition of the value of preventive measures unimpeded by politics or quackery. According to the Lancet-Clinic, the only persons who refused vaccination were “anti-vaccinationists, Christian Scientists and negroes.” The intelligent people of the town, almost to a man, trusted the educated physicians among them—and that trust was dramatically justified.

Add the name of Col. Gustav Pabst to the melancholy roll of deceitful boomers and false alarms. He promised us Muenchener—and he gives us the laugh! Ah, woe!

Meanwhile, the Hon. McCay McCoy might beguile an idle hour by inspecting the paving of Centre street between Howard street and Park avenue—a genuine masterpiece of badness.

The more them stuffers think it over, the more they believe it don’t none pay to be a sucker.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Beware of fake Pilsener!