Baltimore Evening Sun (6 December 1912): 6.

THE FRFE LANCE

And every time an arm is scratched, a medical freedomist yells “Damn!”

The boomers! The boomers! I wonder where they’re at! I do not know, but still I guess they’re busy with the hat.—Adv.

Get in your order for this one early:

“On the Enforcement of Law in Cities,” by Brand Whitlock, Mayor of Toledo. (Bobbs- Merrill.)

Absurd remark of the Hon. Satan Anderson, Captain of the Killjoys:

[The Hon.] Mr. Mencken concedes the falling off in production in the dry States, and as the liquor men and the Interstate Commerce Commission have admitted the falling off in transportation, it looks like local option does really cut some ice, after all.

In the production of liars, yes; in the putting down of boozing, no. The fact is, and the Hon. Mr. Anderson must know it very well, that the transportation returns, whether of the liquor men or of the Interstate Commerce Commission, by no means show the total amount of firewater shipped into the dry States. Most of that firewater goes in disguise. Some of it appears in the returns as breakfast food, overalls or agricultural machinery; more poses as nerve tonic, malt whisky, cough syrup, ambrosia, horse liniment, peppermint extract, near-beer or “nonalcoholic” grapejuice. But it is all firewater, and it is all guzzled the drys. Hence the appalling pestilences of mayhem, jim-jams and political treachery in the domains of well-water. In some parts of Georgia, I hear, it is impossible to get enough sober men to make a posse of honorary pallbearers. Civilization is suspended; the dead lie unburied.

No; the passage of sumptuary and hypocritical State laws does not put down the Rum Demon, and neither would the passage of a Federal act prohibiting the shipment of liquor to dry territory. The only effect of that act would be to convert the liars of today into smugglers tomorrow. Firewater would still cross the boundaries, to ease the parched gullets of the dry deacons. But instead of going by train, decently disguised as underwear or paregoric, it would go by road and by moonlight. In order to enforce the law, the Federal Government would have to throw a cordon of soldiers around every dry State, and even then a good many of the soldiers, and perhaps some of their officers, would wink their starboard eyes and levy their benign octroi. Soldiers are not naturally cruel: their capacity for innocent enjoyment is just as great as any other man’s.

The fallacy that the Hon. Mr. Anderson and all other whoopers-up of chemical purity fall into is the fallacy of assuming that it is possible to out down a human weakness by calling it a crime, and by providing for its severe punishment by law. Not so. The only effect of such a proceeding is to add one more law to the roster of dead letters. The average sane human being does not think that it is a crime to take a swig of toddy, and no threat or penalty will ever convince him that it is. The more he is threatened, indeed, the more determined he will be to exercise his rights, and all of his friends and neighbors will help him. If tobacco chewing were made a crime tomorrow, and the death penalty provided for it, the hangman would have no more work than he has today. Why? Simply because all civilized and self-respecting men would join in a conspiracy to nullify the law.

But I by no means argue that Rum is immortal as well as immoral, that mankind will take it aboard to the end of time. On the contrary, it seems to me likely that, in some remote and golden age, it will be formally abandoned, just as witch-burning, smallpox and homicidal theology have been abandoned. But that change will be brought about, not by passing sumptuary laws, but by changing the habits and outlook of man. In brief, the campaign must be one of education and persuasion, and not one of violence and monkey-shines, Once you have convinced four-fifths of all civilized men that alcohol does them no good, and have persuaded them to give it up, voluntarily and by honest conviction, you will have a form of prohibition that will actually prohibit. But so long as the vast majority of them think otherwise, and make mental exceptions of themselves even when they vote for stringent laws, you will have liquor-bibbing in this world. And the more laws you pass, the more hypocrites you will make, and the more you will prosper the Rum Demon.

But a point remains. If the proposed Federal law against shipping alcohol into dry States would be unenforceable, why are the liquor dealers so violently against it? Simply because they don’t want to be put to fresh risk, trouble and expense. It would cost them more to run the blockade than it now costs them to pack their jugs in sugar barrels, and they would be at the constant expense of fighting punitive proceedings brought by virtuosi of virtue. So they prefer to have things as they are, and I, for one, don’t blame them. Liquor dealers are not professional law-breakers by nature; they prefer to obey the laws, and do so whenever they can. Therefore, they oppose, and with good excuse, the enactment of new laws which they couldn’t possibly obey and survive. They have money invested in their business; they object to being ruined to satisfy the sporting instincts of a gang of old maids, male and female.

Standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League for the week ended November 9:

Baltimore 537 Pittsburgh 187 Boston 298 Chicago 178 New York 293 Philadelphia 084 St. Louis 291 Cleveland 000

Somehow, a body don’t hardly hear nothing no more about no more of them stuffers no more.

Also, the new Harry paper might print some views of Paving Bob’s College for Paving Inspectors.

Let us keep the money, and we care not who makes the laws.—Reveries of the Ex-Sheriffs.

Guttaperchacaput, n, one who believes that the ex-sheriffs will have to disgorge, a rubberhead, a bouncehead.

As between Harry and John Walter—Harry every time! He has wept for himself, true enough, but never for Lorimer.

In the first issue of the super-Mahon’s new paper Editor Aristides will print all seven of the letters praising the late message to the Job Hounds.—Adv.

If Col. Jactobus Hook is really a man of gratitude, he will give the Concord Club a new parlor carpet or have the cellar whitewashed.—Adv.