Baltimore Evening Sun (30 October 1912): 6.

A quack is a physician who has decided to admit it.

Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damphool.

A trained nurse is a kind lady who secretly warns the patient against taking the medicines of the doctor.

The Right Hon. Daniel Joseph Loden to the plain people of the Nineteenth ward:

I am in favor of the sewer rental proposition for several reasons. One of those reasons is that I shall have the collection of the rentals, and perhaps that will mean an increase in my clerical force * * * and place for competent Democrats of the Nineteenth ward.

Depend on Dan to tell the truth. He is, so far as I know, the only honest politician in Baltimore, the only one who never tries to disguise himself in the tin halo and white chemise of a reformer. While the Archangel Harry, the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough, the Hon. S. S. Field, LL.D. and the rest of the rhetoricians defend the sewer rental plan with unparalleled and awe-inspiring sophistries, Dan comes forward frankly with the one sound argument in its favor. Of every 100 votes it gets next Tuesday that argument will get it 60.

The Hon. S. M. Farrell, the eminent anti-vivisectionist whooper, to The Evening Sun:

In our issue of October 12 [the Hon.] Mr. H. L. Mencken speaks of anti-vivisectionists as “insatiable liars.” In reply to this statement may I say that I always regret an opponent’s resort to epithets?

Particularly, I daresay, when they reach the mark and have a disconcerting appositeness and accuracy.

But, after all, I may be unjust to the anti-vivisectionists, or at any rate to some of them. No doubt there are a few who are not liars, but merely fools. For instance, those who announce solemnly that “Pasteur does not cure hydrophobia, he causes it”--a doctrine not infrequently coupled with the Christian Science theory that there is no such thing as hydrophobia. No more perfect specimen of a numskull indictment is imaginable, for, on the one hand it denies that Pasteur can do something he specifically admits he can’t do, and on the other hand it accuses him of doing the very thing he specifically claims he can do.

But what would you? To argue that anti-vivisectionists are fools is merely to argue that fools are fools. One more example and I return to loftier themes. In glancing through a batch of anti-vivisectionist pamphlets recently I found a horrible tale about a pathologist who cut a blood vessel in a dog and then applied pure carbolic acid to the cut surface. As usual, there appeared the accusation that no anæsthetics were used. Dost see the joke, beloved? If not, then go ask your family doctor if he can think of any more effective local anæsthetic than pure carbolic acid.

Open letter to the Right Hon. Daniel Joseph Loden, margrave of the Nineteenth ward:

Dear Daniel: If you must send brass into my vicinage, to ravish and inflame the adjacent flintheads, please, please, please have them play in tune! Achtungsvoll! H. L. M.

As if to celebrate the Health Department’s gratifying abandonment of bogus figures and boomery, the Public Health Service reports that the standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League for the week ended October 5 was as follows:

The Orioles in the second column! The old order changeth!

Now that Gene Chafin has taken to the woods, the bitter fact begins to emerge that there is no Wet Hope in sight. Let the band play the dead march in “Saul.”

From a pronunciamento by the Hon. John Kronmiller, in the estimable Hot Towel:

Which somebow recalls the Towel’s own masterpiece: “a fatal murder.”

Incidentally, the rest of the Hon. Mr. Kronmiller’s bull to the silicaputs is well worth reading, if only as an example of political rabble-rousing at its silliest. His argument, in brief, is that all voters of the Third district should vote for Taft on the ground that not one of the Democratic or Roosevelt electors happens to be a resident of the district. This cheap appeal to parochial prejudice is the chief stock in trade of eighth-rate politicians. The fact that he turns to it, adorning it with fresh nonsense and new bad English, is an excellent and accurate indication of the draft and beam of the Hon. Mr. Kronmiller.

No matter how long the Brooklyn lynching case drags out, the case against the ex-sheriffs will always have three years clear start of it.

Somehow, a body don’t hardly hear nothing no more about none of them stuffers no more.

Say what you will against them Baltimore County Commissioners, they certainly ain’t no bum reformers.

The City Council has adjourned for two weeks. Is this fair to us lovers of the vulgar?

A Prohibitionist’s complaint to the moral Sunpaper:

The consumption of liquor per capita has increased from 16 to 23 gallons during the 18 or more years the Anti-Saloon League has been in operation.

Three cheers for the Hon. Satan Anderson! Prosit! Zum wohl!

From the Hon. John Kronmiller’s appeal to the numbakulls of the Third district:

* * * the great hospitals, which have made a world-wide reputation for their effective and successful good results.

Let “successful good results” take the quince. A characteristic and significant contribution from the man whose service in Congress set a new standard of ridiculous uselessness.

Col. Jacobus Hook is still hot for the sewer rental plan, but they say he ain’t hardly got no hope.

Woodrow will be elected in spite of the Sunpaper, and the sewer rental plan will be defeated because of the Sunpaper. Such is villainy!

A judge is a law student who is paid for studying, and then doesn’t study.

Rescued from scrapbooks of yesteryear:

Religious liberty is the duty of every man to admit that the religion of every other man is true.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.