Baltimore Evening Sun (22 August 1912): 6.

Beware of wiskinskis, panhandlers and advertising solicitors bearing official “letters of introduction!” Burns is up to every trick!

Don’t accept drinks from strangers! Burns has no conscience!

Don’t babble to your wife! Burns has sleuths in skirts!

Standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League for the week ended July 27:

In other words, Baltimore had relatively twice as much typhoid as all the other first-class cities of the United States taken together! Another fine chance for ———ing Harry to do some ———ing.

AN EXPERT’S VIEW
[The Hon. Rudolph Blaukenburg, reform Mayor of Philadelphia, in The Sun of Monday.]
The curse of the American nation is the politician who has turned contractor. * * * When a political organization is in the contracting business it does not nominate a man to be Mayor who will favor the city, but one who will favor the organization. * * * Corrupt municipalities go in for many improvements because the opportunity for graft is in every improvement * * * The man who leads a political party in a city has no business in the contracting business, nor has any one who helps him lead. * * *

Contributions to a thesaurus of super-Mahonic synonyms for decent newspaper:

Terms used by the super-Mahon to describe a newspaper which compares him to Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland:

Sentimentality, that worst foe of civilization, was always on the side of the late “General” William Booth, pope and treasurer-general of the Salvation Army. He had a truly amazing facility for wringing the willing tear. He could paint the sorrows of the world in terms that would melt a graven image. He was a virtuoso of the touching. It was thus that he won the regard of the late Queen Victoria, that most sentimental of women, and thus that he reached the pocketbooks of the English and American people. How much he got out of them, first and last, I don’t know, but so long ago as 1890 the income of the army was already nearly $4,000,000 a year.

To what end? What has the army accomplished? What has the world got for all that expenditure of money? Are drunkards fewer than they used to be? Does crime decrease? Is there less pauperism? Alas, I doubt it. Far from mitigating wretchedness, the army has merely sentimentalized it, and so the apparent gain has been an actual loss. Which is better: a drunkard in the gutter, his useless life oozing out of him, or an ex-drunkard. in uniform, passing the tambourine, tooting the obscene cornet, squeezing a living out of the romantic and unthinking? I leave the answer to any man who can think without weeping.

That it is virtuous, and even wise, to lift up the fallen I am far from denying. But Booth did not invent that business, nor did he bring to it any device that was both new and valuable. Instead of putting self-respect into loafers, he made mendicants of them. His one great contribution to civilization was the renaissance of begging. The Christianity that he perfected and preached was a form that the world had already abandoned, far back in the Middle Ages, as bogus and degrading. And he spread it, not by appeals to reason, not by raising the higher man against the lower man, but by arousing and inflaming the anthropoid emotions of the chandala. The tambourine was his instrument and symbol: it made bad music, grateful to the flapping ear—and it held money.

But the man’s intentions were good! He did his best to save the lost! Well, maybe he did. But that same defense might be made for the Doukoubars, the flagellants of the Middle Ages, the leaders of the Children’s Crusade. Beside, there to grave doubt that Booth is entitled to it. He was no self-sacrificing apostle, no romantic victim of his own eloquence, but a shrewd man of money, an ardent collector, a despotic boss. His high-handed ways drove his own son out of the army; he was constantly in bitter conflict with other subordinates. For years every scrap of army property stood in his name. He insisted violently, not only upon having absolute control of the whole organization while he lived, but also of naming his successor at his death.

But I am no witness. Turn to better men. For example, turn to Vol. IX of the Collected Essays of Thomas H. Huxley, and there read his sound reasons for distrusting and denouncing the Army, with its “corybantic Christianity,” its military discipline and its elaborate and shameless schemes of money-getting. And then hear another witness, Dr. Howard A. Kelly, to wit, a man who diverges from Huxley, I daresay, in almost everything save their joint belief that man is a mammal. Do you remember a letter Dr. Kelly wrote to The Evening Sun on February 20 last—a letter dealing squarely and heatedly with the comparative virulence of the Army’s “professed anxiety for saving souls” and its obvious mania for grabbing dollars? Do you remember how he denounced its “unseemly and grotesque” fight for the mazuma, and declared that the business had “robbed it of all respect,” and protested against it “in the name of all who are interested in true religion?”

Now comes the dutiful Hot Towel with the news that the Hon. the super-Mahon has lately invented the plan of nominating Presidents by direct vote of the people. A revolutionary idea, to be sure, and one worthy of a statesman so sapient and original. But already various slanderers and ganefs try to steal his glory. For example, the Hou. J. Charles Linthicum, consumed by jealousy, seeks to make it appear that the same plot was proposed by the Hon. Richmond Pearson Hobson as far back as December of last year. And before long, no doubt the Hon. Jonathan Bourne, Jr., will come into court with the plea that he has been advocating the thing for six years. Thus all great reformers and genii are opposed by the envious and vicious. Thus, carrion crows pick tail-feathers from the archangels.