Baltimore Evening Sun (16 November 1912): 6.

Camilleocaput, n, a voter of easy virtue, a frailhead.

VICTORY FOR THE SINGLE TAX.

The prize for the most succinct and succulent platitude of the week is awarded to the Hon. John Salmon, the Single Taxer, for the following hot one:

No man can escape rent.

The committee makes honorable mention of the Right Hon. James Harry Preston, LL.B., for the following:

It is no disgrace to be * * * an officeholder—if you do your full duty.

And of the virtuous and oleomaniacal Hot Towel for this frank confession:

The purchaser has a right to know just what he is buying.

The prize of the week, a gallon jug of old-fashioned witch hazel, vanilla flavor, from the famous goose grease laboratories of the Towel, will be forwarded to the Hon. Mr. Salmon at once. Next week’s prize will be an Edam cheese wrapped in tinfoil.

The Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, arising in his accustomed place this day, argues learnedly against the recognition of the social evil on the ground that prostitution is inextricably mingled with old-fashioned politics, and that the prosperity of the one makes for the prosperity of the other. But does it? I doubt it. The close connection between prostitution and potitics is apparent, of course, in every large city, and in none more than in Baltimore, but the truth is that the politician chiefly profits, not so much by the prosperity of the prostitute as by the imperilling of her prosperity—in brief, by her need of protection. Hound her from pillar to post, and she will have to hire a politician to protect her. But give her a quasi-official status, non-forfeitable during good behavior, and she can afford to laugh at him.

Is all this mere philosophizing and wind music? Not at all. Let me point to the condition that has existed in Baltimore for five years past, and still exists with few changes today. The keeper of a disorderly house, if she obeys the rules laid down by the Police Board, is not molested. And knowing that she will not be molested, she need pay no tribute to politicians. What is more, she doesn’t. There are dozens of such women in Baltimore who pay no protection money whatever, either to policemen or to politicians, and who haven’t paid any for five years.

But once you take away from them their present quasi-legal status, you will lay them open to pillage. Denounced by Vice-Crusaders and pursued by the police, they will adopt tho obvious device of trying to bribe the police, and if the actual police prove virtuous they will go to the politicians. who are the bosses of the police. In brief, you will add politics and bribery to prostitution without decreasing prostitution itself in the slightest. And that is why I think that segregation, whatever its failures in detail, is a better principle than dispersion. It is bad, true enough, but it is not nearly so bad as the remedy proposed for it.

But it is unlawful! Of course it is. That, however, is merely saying that our laws are hypocritical and asinine. They prohibit something which even their warmest advocates admit can never be stamped out, and by so prohibiting it they subject it to blackmail. All honor to those judges and policemen who have sought, by extra-legal means, to keep that blackmail down. They are denounced and defamed by moralists—to such an extent, indeed, that it is assumed as an axiom that they are scoundrels and fools—but they have saved us so far from the imbecilities of the farmers and ward heelers assembled at Annapolis, and I have great hopes that they will continue to save us in future. Our laws are made by donkeys; we must trust to saner men to put sense into them.

Ichthyocaput, n, an admirer of the super-Mahon, a fishhead.

The Hon. Satan Anderson in today’s Letter Column:

We ask the Free Lance whether he would himself continually go to great trouble and perhaps walk a long distance and then go through a livery stable and out a narrow passage way up into a loft for the purpose of getting a stale, flat imitation of his favorite beverage handed out to him through a trough set in the wall for two or three times the normal price of a good article.

The answer is simple: of course I would do it. So would every other honest and self-respecting man. It is the highest duty of the good citizen to break and nullify all inquisitorial, ridiculous laws. I myself now violate the Sunday laws every Sunday, not because I thirst for alcohol on that day, but simply because I do not want to shirk my share of the burdens of civilization. I do not want my innocent children to blush when they think of me.

As for the “stale, flat imitation” of the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s vision, I have no fear of it. True enough, the cost of all beverages will rise under local option, but while this will have the effect of switching many penurious drinkers from honest liquor to hogwash, honest liquor, I am sure, will still be obtainable. The only difference will be that it will cost more. Thus the man who now spends $1,000 or $1,500 a year on drink will then have to spend $2,000 or $2,500. Personally, he will get just what he gets now—but his family will probably get less.

This is one of the chief objections to local option. Instead of decreasing the sale of alcohol, it will merely increase the cost of alcohol. (I speak here, of course, of local option in large cities, and not of local option on South Sea islands or in isolated villages of the Kansas steppe.) And as the cost goes up, the romance of drinking will be augmented. I myself now pass 200 open saloons a day and seldom think of going in. But if they were clandestine saloons, I should probably try to buck my way in for the sheer sport of it, just as thousands of Baltimoreans now spend all day Sunday going from. road-house to road-house in the suburbs, or experiment with side-doors in the city.

Annapolis dispatch from the estimable Hot Towel of this morning:

The movement for a Greater Annapolis took definite shape tonight under the inspiration of glowing talks by [the Hon.] Edwin L. Quarles, secretary of the Greater Baltimore Committee * * * and [the Hon.] N. M. Parrott. * * *

All that was needed, indeed, to make Annapolis double in population on the spot, was the presence of the Hon. Charles H. Dickey, that honeyed orator, that champion committeeman, that builder and rescuer of cities, that insatiable banqueter, that shrinking and unselfish patriot.