Baltimore Evening Sun (2 December 1912): 6.

Pyrocaput, n, a murderer of newspapers, a firehead.

If you missed the Hon. Charles Bonaparte’s article Saturday, you missed a well-considered, eloquent and obviously earnest plea for the enforcement of all laws and ordinances upon the statute books, however ridiculous, however dangerous, however insincere, however unenforceable. What is more, the learned author buttressed and armored that plea with copious citations from his own experience as a juriconsult, and particularly from his experience in the high office of Attorney-General of the United States, mentioning specifically the Public Lands cases, the Southern peonage cases, certain White Slave cases and various anti-trust cases, all of lamentable celebrity and imperishable memory.

And yet--and yet--he failed, I believe, to make any mention whatever of the most famous of all his cases--a case discussed from every stump in the late campaign and for long a stock topic of the newspapers. I allude, of course, to the eminent Harvester case. Can it be that Mr. Bonaparte forgot it? Or does he admit that, after all, the enforcement of a plain and mandatory law may be sometimes suspended, that the rigors of the statutes may be gently conditioned, mitigated, ameliorated, by considerations not found in the statutes themselves--to wit, by considerations of tactics, strategy, prudence, public policy? I wonder!

The Harvester case, true enough, is not chronically dodged by Mr. Bonaparte. He seems to have no fear of it. He has expounded it and explained it on many an occasion. And yet, for all his lighting of its mysteries, a large number of persons, including many who are neither scoundrels nor insane, still continue to debate it and to speculate upon it. There was the Anti- Trust law--and there was the Harvester Trust. The Anti-Trust law remained--and the Harvester Trust remained. How? Why? Wherefore? What became of Duty? What became of the Plain Letter of the Law?

Personally, I get into no rage about this Gross Neglect, this flouting of a Sacred Obligation. I believe, with the late Colonel Roosevelt, that the prosecution of the Harvester Trust, though unconditionally enjoined by the statutes, was at the moment inadvisable, that a brief hesitation was indicated, that too much frenzy for the letter of duty would have done far more harm than good. But how about the Police Board of Baltimore city, now on trial before a moral court-martial for high crimes and misdemeanors? It, too, is sworn to enforce the laws, and it, too, finds that the enforcement of one of them--to wit, the Blue one--is inadvisable. And not only inadvisable, but downright impossible. How now?

Certainly, the Hon. Mr. Bonaparte does not demand that the Police Commissioners be magicians, that they do the impossible. Certainly he must know, as a student of jurisprudence, that they have abundant precedent for evading the hopeless task--in brief, for pulling the teeth of an impossible law. All our legal quibbles of today, unless I err, are survivals from a day when judges and juries joined in devising schemes to nullify the harsh and unenforcible laws upon the books. And all our great masters of jurisprudence have viewed that unlawful enterprise with toleration. Even Blackstone, a worshiper of the statutes. has nothing to say against it, as any one may find by turning to Book IV, Chapter I, Verse 19, of his celebrated work. There, if I read him aright, he speaks without protest, and even with considerable approbation, of juries which “forget their oaths, and either acquit the guilty or mitigate the nature of the offense.”

What is sauce for the canvasback must be sauce for the humble pullet. What Bonaparte could do and Blackstone could approve is obviously no crime in lesser and weaker men. The Police Board, sworn to enforce the Sunday law, does its darndest--and angels could do no more. That its darndest happens to be next to nothing is beside the point: it has nevertheless done its darndest. If, in the face of that effort, the law is still violated, then put the blame upon the mushiks and ward heelers who passed it and refuse to repeal it, and not upon honest men who are struggling with it. And thank fortune for those men. Whatever you say against them, you must at least admit that honesty of theirs--and to be honest is to be rare and angelic and honorable and almost inconceivable.

As for Article 27, Chapter 19, of the Public General Laws of Maryland, let Mr. Bonaparte cease to worry over it. The truth is that it is actually enforced in Baltimore, and to the letter. So far as I know, no guilty person ever escapes. Once a year every violator is solemnly detected, indicted, tried, found guilty and fined. A moral lecture follows, and all hands are admonished to sin no more. Could a literalist imagine a more beautiful procedure? Far from protesting against it, Mr. Bonaparte should weep over it--and I have no doubt that he will when he thinks it over calmly, and that he will follow up the weeping by apologizing to the learned justices of the Supreme Bench, whose fidelity to their oaths he has so unjustly questioned.

But enough! I ooze into the subject of Vice, and of Vice I grow weary, along with many estimable readers. When I first lifted my feable voice against the Vice Crusaders of this town, I had no hope of putting them down, and what is more, I made the specific admission that I had no remedy to take the place of theirs. All I sought to do was to convince the public that most of these gentlemen were excited fanatics, with no sound knowledge of the problem they presumed to discuss, and no genuine pity for the women they essayed to “save.” That end, I believe, I have accomplished, at least in part. I have proved the fatuity of many of their “facts” and the sophistry of most of their conclusions. Finally, I have raised doubts as to their intellectual honesty--not their common honesty, of course, but their intellectual honesty, their ability to look at things without emotion, their capacity for clear reasoning, their respect for the truth.

Let the public understand moral crusading aright. It is not an altruistic enterprise: it is merely a grandiloquent form of sport. At the bottom of it, if I make no mistake, there is nothing more respectable than a yearning to boss, to harass, to punish. Its chief exponents do not seek the truth. They fear and avoid the truth; they revile every man who makes an honest effort to get at the truth. Their one desire us to run things to suit themselves, at whatever cost to public decency and the public security.