Baltimore Evening Sun (3 December 1912): 6.

Consider, beloved, the moral mind. The Hon. the super-Mahon, informed by his spies that some obscure jobholder in the Health Department has demanded $5 of a plumber, breaks into a hurricane of indignation and shakes the whole town with his pious denunciations of graft. One might fancy the City Hall burgled, or Jake Hook shanghaied, or an orphan asylum set afire and all its inmates roasted. But no, all that has happened is that an eighth-rate jobholder has been accused, apparently on bad evidence, of taking the price of an opera ticket. And yet this same super-Mahon, a year or so ago, when nearly 300 men were charged with a crime against good order and civilization, and the proofs against them were mounting up, and every decent hypocrite was staggered by the enormity of the conspiracy--what did this same indignant and moral super-Mahon do then? For the first part, he sneered at the Grand Jury. For the second part, he denounced the newspapers. And for the third part, he shut up like a clam and had nothing to say!

Such is militant morality, that highly complex and amusing science. But don’t laugh too loudly at the super-Mahon. Of all the baltimoralists, how many are more honest? Very few. Here is one who weeps scalding tears over the Rum Evil--and then fights child labor laws. Here is a spectacular philanthropist who pays his clerks $8 a week. Here is a booming humanitarian who proceeds against fallen and hopeless women much as one might proceed against jackals. Here is a great reformer who sneaks into the back door of the Royal Family and kisses hands. And so on and so on. Baltimoralists, after all, are human, and to be human is to be a humbug. There may be perfectly honest typhoid bacilli, cockroaches and bullfrogs, and even perfectly honest rats and hippopotamuses, but no one has ever seen a perfectly honest man.

The one way in which the super-Mahon differs from the average man of his class is rather to his credit. He is a less subtle dissembler; he plays a part less convincingly; he has never learned to make his false whiskers look quite real. Now and then a touch of native frankness shows itself in his play-acting, to the damage of the play but to the honor of the man. In brief, his emotions sometimes run away with him--and emotions are always more honest than ideas. Thus it was that he confessed his alliance with Paving Bob Padgett, when the emergencies of the game demanded its concealment. And thus it was that he refused to denounce the stuffers, when a lot might have been gained by denouncing them virtuously and violently.

The average reformer manages himself more skillfully. As the psychologists might say, he has a superior power of inhibition. He keeps his emotions from giving him away; he plays a more consistent and affecting part. But that he is more honest, at bottom, than the super-Mahon does not follow. He, too, is in the business for what he can get out of it, in office, profit, or esteem. He may find himself, at times, with the majority of men against him, but there is always a minority to hail him chief, to flatter him, to venerate him, to grease him, to repay him for his pains. Sometimes that minority may be small, but it is always there, and its voice, being agreeable, seems loud and sonorous to the reformer’s ear. In all history, you will not find a record of a single reformer who stood up against all men. Even the wildest of them has had his claque, his bay leaves, his occasional glow of success.

But as I was saying, the super-Mahon fails as a reformer because his honest emotions constantly play hob with his well-laid plans. At the moment he is an eloquent advocate of a degree of official virtue almost unattainable under civilization, and certainly impossible to most ordinary men. And yet we all know how he dodged the obvious implications of that ideal when certain of his own friends and followers came into conflict with it. In brief, his human sympathy for the stuffers completely obliterated his theoretical detestation of their act and so he not only failed to denounce them, but even undertook the difficult job of scaring their pursuers to death. And in the same way, when it came to a question of choosing between Paving Bob and an ideal of chemical purity, he chose Bob for old time’s sake and let chemical purity--the domino of all reformers, the official uniform of reform--go hang. Mixed figures, but you catch the idea.

Personally, I like such a human and fallible reformer much better than I like the rigid, unyielding, wholly bogus kind. It is not in the nature of man to be perfectly virtuous, and any man who tries to make you believe that he has attained to such a state is a liar and a rascal. Of much higher respectability is the reformer who gives frank evidence, now and then, of his human weakness. Our weakness is the one thing that we have in common, and so it somehow pleases us in others, like the echo of a familiar song. I would not give a hoot for a man without vices. Such a man, if he were imaginable, would be like a man without prejudices, a flaccid and intolerable doll, a mental and moral vacuum, an indecent parody upon imperfect and gemuethlich humanity.

But don’t fear: he doesn’t exist. Contemplating this or that baltimoralist you may sometimes stand appalled before his apparent virtue. He seems to be wholly good: there is nothing pleasant and immoral that he is not against. He denounces, in the same sepulchural tones, the Rum Demon, tobacco, graft, Back River, gambling, Rabelais, dancing, kissing games, the theatre, horseracing, the opera, bribery, novel-reading, pugilism and bare shoulders. But subject him to the third degree and you will find that he, too, has his vice, that he, too, yields to some obscure form of voluptuousness. Maybe he clicks his false teeth rhythmically as he speaks; maybe he writes moral poetry; maybe he is a coffee souse; maybe he snores; maybe he cultivates whiskers; maybe he beats his children. Whatever his vice, it is his master, as liquor-drinking is the master of so many statesmen. Whatever his virtue, it is conditioned, limited, finite. He is human, for all his disguise, and being human, he is a fake.

I speak here with some authority, for I am a reformer myself and have been so for many years. What is more, I have a wide acquaintance among other reformers. They come to me, soon or late, as to a kindred spirit, and so I have plenty of chance to study them. But don’t get the notion, I prithee, that my verdict upon them is wholly unfavorable. As a matter of fact, it is not. I admire them and venerate them. Say what you will against them, I am thoroughly convinced that the average reformer is fully as respectable as the average bartender.