Baltimore Evening Sun (30 July 1912): 6.

All honor to the Hon. Jack Barrymore, the eminent actor, for his late assault upon a Los Angeles barber. The barber poured some foul hair “lotion” upon Jack’s hair—and Jack cracked the porphyry skull of the barber. Would that more men had his rage and his sinew! The crimes of barbers have gone on long enough. They must understand, once and for all time, that decent men object to their filthy salves, their abominable ointments, their suffocating talcums, their stinking perfumes. And they must understand, too, that the application of such disgusting things, without the customer’s consent and against his express orders, is an insult unspeakable and unforgivable and that its just punishment is a good beating. Who will be the first in Baltimore to follow Jack?

Scandalous saying of the Hon. Jean Jacques Rousseau, in “Du contrat social” (1762):

It is contrary to the natural order that the majority should govern and that the minority should be governed.

A reactionary is anyone who plays pool or eats ice-cream with a City Councilman.

That gladiator who lately hacked and dismembered the Hon. Witliam Shepard Bryan, Jr., in The Evening Sun Letter Column now pursues me with denunciations for presuming to go to the hon. gent.’s defense. Says he:

[The Hon.] Shep Bryan was never complimented with the name of [The Hon. M.] Rabelais. He may lapse, now and then, into a bit of Rabelaisian phraseology—but he a Rabelais! Jamais de la vie! [The Hon. M.] Rabelais was an iconoclast, a dissenter. a sham-penetrating blade! Not so [The Hon. Mr.] Shepard!

With all due respect, rubbish! In the Hon. M. Rabelais’ time, it was the fashion to be orthodox, and therefore the Hon. M. Rabelais became an iconoclast when he became heterodox. But in this present year of grace, it is the fashion to be heterodox, and so the Hon. Mr. Bryan is an iconoclast when he raises his howl for orthodoxy. Quad erat demonstrandum.

Us frail-heads out in the Nineteenth ward are all het up by the canning of the Hon. Bill Johnson. Some say the Hon. Dan Loden done wrong to have Bill canned, and some say he done right. Then again, some say Dan never had nothing to do with it, but that Harry done it. The way you hear the talk in the barber shops you can’t hardly tell whether you ought to believe nobody at all. But every person you meet seems to agree that Bill bust into something.

Seasonable advice by Geheimrat Prof. John Turner, Jr., surgeon-general to the old-fashioned admintstration:

Usually, if one-eighth of a rabbit is varnished, one-half of a horse, and one-quarter of a dog, the result is fatal. * * * Hence the importance of keeping the skin perfectly clean. * * * Some people depend upon the friction of their clothes against the moving parts of the body for cleanliness, but it is bad hygiene.

The estimable Ledger-Enterprise of Pocomoke City, to whose boosting of medical freedom, and particularly of Chichester’s Diamond Brand Pills, I lately called attention, thus defends and excuses itself:

The truth is that the American people demand a certain amount of buncombe * * * whether it appertains to mosquitoes, dog days, malaria, patent medicines, allopathy. medical freedom or free anything else. And nowhere is that fact more clearly recognized than with [by?] the astute management of The Baltimore Evening Sun, in the establishment of the Free Lance column to meet this particular craving of the American public.

Profound and sagacious words, to which I give my enthusiastic assent, with three cheers. We at least, O Ledger-Enterprise, are on to ourselves. We may sell pills, true enough, but we are not fool enough to believe in them.

Contributions to the armamentarium of genuine boomery:

Between January 1 and March 31 of the present year there were 8,850 cases of smallpox in the United States. Not one was in Maryland. During the whole period of the Democratic National Convention, from June 15 to July 6, there was not one death from typhoid in Baltimore.

Why keep on circulating balderdash about there being no slums in Baltimore when these actual facts are so handy?

The Hot Towel: the Dr. Doan’s Kidney Pill of journalism.

From the estimable Sunpaper of two or three days ago:

Water Engineer Whitman would like to know who threw a dead cow and two pigs into Loch Raven.

Four to one that the Democratic Telegram blames it on Satan Anderson.

Further contributions to the directory of public pests:

The recall of decisions: the Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root of politics.

The virtuous Evening Sunpaper shed 20 or 30 seidels of tears yesterday over the sad doings of the common people at Back River. Thus:

Several games were in progress in the dimly lighted ground. It must be confessed that business did not appear at all brisk. A few young men and several of their elders * * * stood about for some time and played now and again, but nothing really exciting occurred. The bar * * * was filled, but not overcrowded.

And so on and so on. Precipitate the cold truth from this stew of moralizing, and what do you get? Simply the fact that a few thousand persons drank a few thousand bottles of cheap rice beer, that a few score shoestring sports lost 40 or 60 cents apiece to half a dozen half-starved sharks.

At Pimlico, every spring and autumn, gambling goes on under the protection of the law. It is the fashionable, the proper thing to go there and bet on the horses. The newspapers treat the proceedings with the utmost respect, printing the betting odds, calling attention to large winnings, discussing the princtisal gamblers, male and female, as if they were persons of importance. Young clerks, eager to cut a figure in the world, go out there and lose their week’s wages. Some go back next day with money from their employers’ tills. * * * Ask the police to tell you the rest.

At Back River a few harmless numbskulls buck the sweat game. The largest loss recorded there is probably short of $4. The whole takings of the sharks, on a busy night, are probably less than $200. The games are frankly crooked; the sucker has no chance whatever to win. Well, he loses his $1.40 and goes home—a sadder and a wiser jackass, perhaps a cured sport. But at Pimlico he sometimes wins, and winning, he goes back. * * *