Baltimore Evening Sun (26 July 1912): 6.

{illustration} Court Circular Padgett Palace, July 25. His Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer the Order of the Feather, second class, upon Geheimrat Prof. Dr. John Turner, Jr., chief medical member of the Privy Council.
The Right Hon. S. S. Field, K. C., Solicitor-General to the Crown, had the honor of being received in audience by his Majesty.
The Right Hon. Daniel Joseph Loden, Master of the Royal Jobhounds, continues as minister in attendance upon his Majesty.
The Right Hon. Sol Warfield, Baron de Gaz, in consideration of his distinguished talents as a hydraulic engineer, has been appointed Captain-General of the Royal Water-Works, with the rank and pay of a Field Marshal.
The name of the Right Hon. John Hubert, Speaker of the Bundesrat, has been stricken from the roll of Privy Councillors.

Profound remark of the Hon. William Shepard Bryan, Jr.:

The wise and thoughtful people of the country are conservative in the correct use of that term, because they believe in the old maxim that the beaten path is the safest.

Safest, beyond a doubt, at least for the day—but wisest, soundest, best? Not always. Perhaps never. All progress is made, indeed, not by clinging to that which is, but by reaching out for that which might be. The really useful man, the man whose life counts for more than that of a good cow, is not the man who agrees but the man who disagrees. In brief, the supreme type of human being is the heretic, or, more conventionally, the scoundrel. And the virtue of a heretic lies not solely, or even chiefly, in the value of his heresy, but in the mere fact of it. He is more important, in other words, as the exponent of a philosophy than as the prophet of a new pill. The pill, in truth, may be wholly useless, or even dangerous, but the philosophy itself remains sound. The one thing that lifts man above the other animals is the fact that he is not satisfied with his world.

Some one has said that the main proof of human progress during the last 500 years is the safety of heresy today. It is still dangerous, of course, to advocate changes in certain directions. For example, the common people would probably want to hang a man who advocated the putting to death of defective children, or the abandonment of democracy, or the repeal of Article 27, Section 3, of the Public General Laws of Maryland. But within limits, heresy has undoubtedly become respectable. So long as a man does not invade a few capital ideas—e. g., the idea that every man has a soul, the idea that the liberty is good in itself, and the idea that there are invariable criteria of truth—he may blaze away at his pleasure. And even when he crosses the bounds, his punishment is no longer burning at the stake, but merely the curses of the virtuous.

But that this change is wholly for the good does not appear clearly. The chief inspiration to heresy, in the past, was not that it was useful, but that it was dangerous. That is to say, the heretic was chiefly lured on, not by the possibility of forcing his views upon the world, for that possibility was often infinitesimal, but by the certainty of a hot fight. He stood for all the lordlier virtues of the race—courage, ruthlessness, a disregard of consequences, even of consequences to himself. Today, with no more stakes in the market place, heresy has been adopted by lesser men, by ignoramuses and milksops, and so it has lost most of its old dignity. Observe the effect upon religious controversy. In the ages when nations went to war over differences in religion the struggle for the truth produced such giants as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas. Francis of Assisi, Luther and Melanchthon; today, with thought free, its masterpieces are Dowie, Mrs. Eddy and General Booth.

It is unimaginable, of course, that heresy will ever become conventional, for that would involve a plain contradiction in terms, but nevertheless it has made an undoubted progress toward conventionality. That is to say, it becomes popular. A politician wins more votes today by advocating some new order than by defending the old order. In consequence, all the shrewder politicians become progressives—not because they believe in the particular panaceas they preach, but because such preaching pays. Thus we behold a new type of Metternich, with his coat turned inside out. Thus we generate Roosevelts and Wilsons.

But perhaps the paradox is only on the surface. The heretic of tomorrow will not be a progressive, but a reactionary. The thing he advocates will not be something that is new, but something that has been tried and abandoned—for instance, aristocracy, religious crusades, a State church. And he will enter upon that advocacy, not because he thinks the world was once better, but because he can’t stand peace. It is, in brief, the combatative instinct rather than any purely rational process that lies at the bottom of all heresy, and it is this combatative instinct, functioning through heresy, that keeps humanity from rotting and dying out.

Public proclamation of the Right Hon. the super-Mahon:

My name has been connected with the Democratic Telegram, a Democratic weekly published in Baltimore. * * * I am not the owner or part owner of that paper.

Then there must be somebody on the staff who loves the honorable gentleman even more than the honorable gentleman loves himself.

A good citizen is any man who doesn’t know any politicians.

Don’t neglect that trip to Back River next Sunday! If you don’t like the beer, stop at one bottle. I don’t like it myself, and yet I shall swallow it as a patriotic duty. The only way to knock out the Blue Laws is to tackle them from the front. Let every good citizen do his part. The Puritans have been having their fun long enough.

If the United Railways Company were as hospitable to the vice of smoking as it is to the vice of Sabbath boozing, life in Baltimore would be a grander and sweeter song, by heck, and darn me if it wouldn’t.

Two new books that are well worth reading:

“Free Will and Human Responsibility,” by H. H. Horne.
“My Life in Prison,” by Donald Lowrie.

A progressive is one who believes that the way to make joy-riding less dangerous is to knock off two wheels of the car.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Chase the rat!