Baltimore Evening Sun (27 July 1912): 6.

Brief note from one who has been barbed and butchered:

When you say that the “witch hazel” used by certain Baltimore barbers is made of wood alcohol and mayonnaise you overpraise it. As a matter of fact it is made of axle grease and benzine, with musk thrown in to make it smelly.

Maybe so. But a chemical friend tells me that he has also found the following substances in barber shop “witch hazel”:

Picric acid Manganese Musty ale Peruna Bordeaux mixture Sheep dip Lye Arnica Smearkase Shellac Formaldehyde Formic acid

The “witch hazel” of commerce, says this chemist, does not contain either lye or formic acid, but barbers add one or the other to make it sting. Unless the customer jumps when it is applied, the average barber feels that he has missed a play. But what would you? With so much fake Pilsener being sold in town, it is no wonder that the faculties of barbers decay. In the old days, when beer was really beer, there was no more humane and sagacious class of men.

Don’t you go worryin’ none. Bob Padgett’ll come back.

That surcharged and uremic correspondent who tackled the Hon. William Shepard Bryan, Jr., in yesterday’s Evening Sun, on the ground that the hon. gent. is a Rabelalsian, had better go cut his throat and forget his complaint. It is not the stray Rabelais that harms Baltimore, but the multitudinous Lydia Pinkham, the innumerable Felicia Hemans, the countless Hannah More. One salty wheeze, in this our virtuous clime, were worth ten thousand booms.

Forgotteen remark of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, of whom you may have heerd tell:

A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world.

Felonious saying of the Hon. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche:

The masses appear to me in but three aspects: first, as blurred copies of their betters, printed on bad paper and from worn-out plates; secondly, as a chronic opposition to progress; and thirdly, as convenient tools. Further than that I hand them over to statistics--and the devil.

The sagacious Hot Towel, in the course of a moral article, has bitter things to say about those local newspapers which engage in occasional feuds with political frauds and mountebanks. Every attack upon rotten government, says the Towel, injures the name and credit of Baittmore. It continues:

Out of town such things make up a deplorable estimate of Baltimore. * * * Nor is it surprising that local concerns have word from Southern centres that if Baltimore is the kind of place that certain of its newspapers make it out to be, they do not want to come here for trade.

A familiar doctrine, and one supported, I daresay, by the great majority of Prominent Baltimoreans. Every effort to get a reasonable decency into the city government “hurts Baltimore.” Every attack upon political pirates is at the same time an attack upon the good name and credit of the city. Every attempt to remedy a public evil is unpatriotic and immoral. Hence the bogus mortality statistics of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association. Hence the constant and convenient concealments of the Towel.

Well, well, let us not dismiss this theory too quickly. Perhaps there may be something in it. Perhaps it may be true, as the Towel believes, that it is better to submit to debauchery than to admit it by fighting it. Perhaps the real patriot is not the fellow who tries to reduce the death rate, but the fellow who denies that it is high and invents figures to prove his case. Perhaps, after all, it is better to sing a hymn than to have the fevered appendix out.

Again, there may be some truth, at bottom, in the familiar doctrine, so ardently preached by boomers, that the Southern merchant is a sentimental ass--that he buys his goods, not where they are cheapest, but where people are happiest, where life is loveliest, where the birds sing sweetest in the trees. Convince him that Baltimore is a little heaven, that its ruling camorra is made up of archangels, that its people are all virtuous and happy, that it is the noblest town in Christendom, and he will come up at the gallop and spend his last dollar.

Alas, the theory is beautiful, but its applications sometimes alarm. For example, consider a late episode in which the Towel itself played a star part. Through the vanity of one man Baltimore was made a public joke throughout the United States. The whole American people laughed at us--at us, mind you, not with us. Certain local newspapers, foreseeing this catastrophe, tried to head it off. That is to say, they tried to induce the chief comedian to take off his makeup and go home. But what did the estimable Towel do? Its part was that of hired claque. It egged the poor fellow on; it praised him as a great actor; it played upon his vanity until all sense departed from him. And then came the climax, the smashup, the horse-laugh. And then Baltimore was “advertised.”

Does the Towel argue that this “advertising” was profitable? Does it maintain that the credit and good name of the city were enhanced? What is more important, does it defend its own part in the business–its seduldus flattery of a vain man, its disgusting piling up of ridiculous praises, its deliberate circulation of saccharine lies, its obscene labor as sycophant, toady, spaniel, parasite and flunky?

If it looks back upon that enterprise with pride, then let it have the joy thereof. But most decent newspapers, like most decent men. would not.

From the estimable American Issue, Maryland Edition:

A judge has ruled that a drunken person has no right to ride on a public street car.

But not in Baltimore. On the contrary, drunken men ride freely here so long as they have the fare. On Saturday nights the street cars swarm with them, and the United Railways apparently welcomes their trade. Not that the United is not moral. Its intense morality, in truth, is one of its most conspicuous characteristics. But that morality is discharged, not at wine-bibbing, but at smoking--the most hideous and lamentable of all vices. Line by line, the United proceeds with its war upon smoking. Soon it will be unlawful to light a stogie upon any street car in Baltimore. But gentlemen in liquor still meet with a hearty hospitality. Thus the Continental Building Baraca class labors for virtue in our fair city.

Further contributions to the directory of public pests:

Pragmatism, Free lunch, Bergsonism, Table tapping, Union music, Cold dinner plates.