Baltimore Evening Sun (25 October 1912): 6.

Those heathen who now rage so eloquently against the church bells of Sunday morning forget altogether the greatest of all the privileges and usufructs of piety. I allude, of course, to the privilege of torturing the heathen. This is greater, indeed, than a mere privilege: it is a high and solemn duty. Consider, for example, the Vice Crusade. Or the Anti-Saloon League.

Apropos of the new anti-noise ordinance a man lately came to me with an interesting story. A friend of his, he said, was a patient at the Hebrew Hospital, on East Monument street opposite the Johns Hopkins Hospital. At the Hopkins a building was being repaired and a lot of old bricks had to be removed. Were they brought down in baskets lined with aseptic cotton, to avoid all noise and dust? They were not. On the contrary, they were shot down a chute with two bends in it, and the noise they made could be heard for three blocks. The friend of my caller, suffering great pain, listened to that uproar for ten days.

What has become of Gene Chafin, the Wet Hope? Can it be that Young Anderson has bluffed him off? Was his bold defiance really courage, or was it only buncombe and wind. music? Gene’s loud talk gave great hope to every one of us Rum Demonists. In our liquorish, enchanted dreams we saw Anderson murdered, skinned, his hide nailed to the fence. And now it begins to appear that Gene was merely one more performer upon the piccolo, one more slobbergobblist, one more fake! Life, indeed, grows sad!

It is related of George Henry Lewes, husband of George Eliot, the famous novelist, that he held his wife in such veneration that he could never bring himself to call her George, even in the intimacy of their own fireside, but invariably addressed her formally as Mr. Eliot.

What with hypochlorite on the one hand and the anti-noise ordinance on the other, there comes new hope that the City Council will soon be numbered with the angels.

The boomers! The boomers! They’ll never stop, by heck! Again they’re buzzing ’round our ears and climbing down our neck!

A Maryland story of genuine humor and interest:

“Zebedee V,” by Edith Barnard Delano (Small-Maynard).

The Sun Building may face on Baltimore street, but with the Hansa Haus under roof its back door is in Munich.--Adv.

For Mayor of Charles and German streets:

Col. Jacobus Hook, K. T.

Among the gentlemen who now maintain a magnificent silence and shed large globules of eloquent sweat one notes the Hon. Alton B. Parker, of Esopus, N. Y., late Master of the Teddyhounds.

Thirty-five cents for the name and address of any Maryland Republican who will lay his hand on the book of Leviticus and swear that he is actually in favor of Taft.

Proposed subject for a public debate between the Hon. James Harry Preston and the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough, each to speak on both sides:

Resolved, That the Hon. Fred. Wright is even more hellish than the Sunpaper.

Say what you will against Dan Loden (and he ain’t no angel, by no means!), anyhow he drums up all the boys and tells ’em when to yell when a Certain Party comes around.--Adv.

From The Light, a monthly journal devoted to the Vice Crusade and published by a talented tear-squeezer named B. S. Steadwell at La Crosse, Wisconsin:

It would be hard to find a day during the last five years when there has not been some sort of vice investigation on hand in Chicago.

And yet, after all that labor, Chicago remains today a respectable rival to Port Said and Gomorrah. Even Steadwell hinidelf admits as much: the best he can say for the present situation is that it offers “real ground for hope that the city will at leat to some extent be cleaned up.” This is the same Chicago, by the way, which was reported to be chemically pure a year ago by my excellent friend the Hon. Samuel E. Pentz, of the local Vice Crusaders. I ventured to question, at that time, the accuracy of the Hon. Mr. Pentz’s report, and was cruelly sat upon for my pains, to the delight of all virtuosi of virtue.

Steadwell’s paper, which has come to me from a gentleman prominent in the Vice Crusade and which plainly bears his approbation, is full of misstatements and extravagances. One of its contributors, Miss (Mrs.?) M. Madeline Southard, presents all of the old and preposterous arguments against the so-called double standard of morality. No sane man, I fancy, is unaware of the grounds upon which that double standard is based, and not many men save Vice Crusaders doubt that those grounds are sound in physiology and in morals. And yet there is probably no rule of human conduct which is more often attacked by sentimentalists, or with a greater emission of sophistry, hypocrisy and utter nonsense.

Naturally enough, the White Slave Trade, that dreadful hobgoblin, comes in for a large share of Steadwell’s attention. He mentions, with unctuous satisfaction, the proposal that slave-trading be punished by death--and then he proceeds to the naive admission that the new Federal law is itself the creator of much of the so-called slave-trading now going on. To quote:

A short time ago we were enabled to warn a young man who through kindness was about to aid an immoral woman to go from a city in one state to a city in another State. We could not convince him that it would be a crime, no matter how hard the woman had pleaded to be sent, until we showed him a copy of the Federal law.

In truth, men are now being threatened with prison, as white slave traders, for a crime no worse than that of crossing a State line in the company of a woman known or thought to be no better than she should be. And meanwhile, the susceptible public is being regaled with marvelous and salacious tales of women bound, gagged and drugged, of a vast organization of slave traders, of slaves penned up like felons and sold at auction like cattle. The truth is, of course, that all that melodrama is 99 per cent. buncombe. Of the women living in prostitution in Baltimore today, I venture to say that not one in 500 is under the slightest duress whatever. All that any one of them need do, if she really wants to escape, is to go to the window and yell for the police, or appeal to the gas man or beer man.