Baltimore Evening Sun (22 July 1912): 6.

Boil your drinking water! Swat the fly! Chase the slippery rat!

A flabbergasting and lamentable conflict of evidence:

The left-hand quotation is from the New York Sunpaper of Saturday. That to the right is from the estimable Democratic Telegram of the same day.

Secret advice of the Eutaw street tipsters: Play Teddy for place.

Slanderous note from one full of bile and wormwood:

You say that Bob McCuen confines himself to “dag it.” Wrong again. I have heard him say “d--n.”

Maybe so. But not officially, not in his public capacity. What a man says when be draws a deuce and a three-spot to a pair of kings is his own business. As Superintendent of Lamps and Lighting the Hon. Mr. McCuen sticks to “dag it,” with “dog gone” as a pleasant relief for Sundays and legal holidays. Would that every other department head in the City Hall were as refined in speech. Life there would be gentler, suaver, more civilized.

Civilization has its triumphs. I wrote the word h–l-box Saturday, and it got into The Evening Sun with the h–l spelled out--that id to say, without antiseptic dashes. But every time the frog of progress climbs a step he also slips back a step. The proofreader who let the word go through was discharged Saturday night, and is now seeking a city job. H–l is once more h–l. Virtue wins.

The estimable Ledger-Enterprise, of Pocomoke City, which lately began a flirtation with the medical freedomists, has so far recovered that it is now printing solemn notices to the people of Pocomoke warning them that mosquitoes cause malaria and that impure milk causes typhoid. Thus the ancient fallacies of the allopaths are triumphant once more and the revolutionary teachings of medical freedom are scorned. So long as folks believe that mosquitoes can cause malaria the great discoveries of osteopathy, chiropractic and Christian Science must go for naught. Even Peruna, that priceless boon, cannot long survive such Egyptian hunkerousuess.

Meanwhile, let it be said in extenuation, the Ledger-Enterprise throws a bone to medical freedom by formally recognizing the right of the plain people to dose and poison themselves. That is to say, it opens its columns to Doan’s Kidney Pills, Hall’s Catarrh Cure, Hall’s Family Pills and Chichester’s Diamond Brand Pills. The last-named, in particular, are worthy of notice in a family paper, as you will find by turning to Page 431 of “Nostrums and Quackery,” issued by the American Medical Association, the abhorrent Medical Trust.

More contributions to the roster of intolerable pests:

Free reading notice: No matter how hot the day, it is always breezy on the Emerson roof.

Daily thought from “The Physiology of the Human Body and Hygiene” by Geheimrat Prof. Dr. John Turner, Jr., head of the super-Mahonic medical department:

Crowd poison is a fatty material which is exhaled, and which usually sticks to fancy trimmings, bric-a-brac, etc., in the room. It is more poisonous than CO2, and is correspondingly dangerous. In a room with ½% to 1% of CO2 people will not experience much inconvenience, but with less than that they become sick, due to the presence of the crowd poison. (Page 224.)

With one Federal judge awaiting trial before the Senate on charges of gross corruption and another facing a public accusation of drunkenness and wire-pulling, the curtain seems to be rising upon an extensive muckraking of the judiciary--an instructive and salutary business, too long delayed. All of the muckraking of the last dozen years has been confined to the executive and legislative departments of the Government. The judicial arm has remained unvaccinated and unwashed, whereby and because of which it is today an exceedingly unkempt and unappetizing member, and sorely in need of attention. What it wants specifically is prolonged immersion in bichlorlde and the vigorous application of a currycomb. Both measures, it now seems probable, will be applied forthwith. Let us be glad.

The judiciary has long profited, in this fair land, by the fact that the common people are trusting and romantic. They must have an idol--something to revere, something to worship--a week-day divinity. In monarchies it is the king that wrings their dutiful tears. In this free republic it has been the judiciary. The judges themselves, at the start, did much to produce and even to deserve this deification of their craft. They kept out of ward politics, they took no bribes, they refrained from carrying their jugs to the bench. What is more, they constantly insisted, in their decisions and otherwise, that they were super-human and impeccable--a remote and esoteric caste, without the common failings of humanity. Mere repetition, more or less supported by fact, had its effect. The people began to believe that the bench was without sin--and until very lately they believed it still.

Even vow they are not disposed to accept the contrary without a struggle. In their executive and legislative officers they have little confidence. They admit that an occasional Governor or Mayor may be an honest and worthy man, and when they encounter one who is--or who appears to be--they support him loyally, but they have no belief that the mere occupancy of such an office is proof of merit, or even of common decency. Of Legislatures they are even more suspicious. They see the average, the normal Legislator or City Councilman, not as an ardent and self-sacrificing public servant, but as a grasping and dubious fellow, half jackass and half jackal. Things have come to such a pass, indeed, that it is dangerous for an honest man to accept service as lawmaker, for his reputation suffers by his associations, and even when he engages in open battle with the majority, many persons doubt his sincerity.

But, as I have said, the judiciary retained, until latety, a large measure of public respect. It was [More about it tomorrow.]