Baltimore Evening Sun (9 December 1912): 6.

The Hon. the super-Mahon to the ladies of the Women’s Civic League.

I am going to gire you smooth streets * * * but you must expect to pay for them.

And not only once, but two or three times.

One of the sorrows of my miserable life is my constant need of entering into malevolent controversy with the Hon. Satan Anderson, a man whom I love for his gemuethlichkeit and venerate for his genuine talents as an assassin. The common notion of the hon. gent., believe me, is all wrong: he is not the beetle-browed villain of kaif gossip, immersed in interminable hypocrisies, fugitive from an outraged law, filled with secret fire-water. Far from it, indeed. On the contrary, he is a humane and estimable man, fond of simple and honest joys, a great reader of the works of Charles Dickens, a hearty eater, a lover of domestic animals, a passable performer upon the fiddle and pianola. And what is more, he is actually a teetotaler.

So much I must say in simple justice to the man, whatever my revilings and defiances of the dialectician. But it is the very fact of his chemical purity, I believe, that makes the hon. gent. so violent and wrong-headed a rabble-rouser, so immovable and dangerous a virtuoso of virtue. In brief, he has no intelligent comprehension of the uses and usufructs of Rum, that greatest of all agents of human happiness, and so he wastes his time belaboring it as a curse, and denounces me in his weekly paper every time I rise to its defense. He is not vicious, he is merely ignorant--and I wish, as a sincere admirer, that he were not.

Going further, I follow up my wish by proposing a plan to educate and mellow him. That plan is simplicity itself. It consists of a mere exchange of habits, for the period of three calendar months, between the Hon. Mr. Anderson and myself. I am a mild user of alcohol in its more nourishing and beautiful forms; the Hon. Mr. Anderson eschews and fears it in all forms. Well, let the Hon. Mr. Anderson adopt my routine fur three months, and I will adopt his. That to to say, I will go upon the water-wagon if he will jump off.

What eould be more simple? Or more fair? Each of us suffers from a misunderstanding of the principles and habits of mind of the other. We argue from different premises, from antagonistic data, out of incommensurate experiences. The Hon. Mr. Anderson knows nothing of the soft caresses and sweet stimulations of Rum, and I know nothing of the joys of conscious rectitude. He is full of the prejudices of his virtue and I am full of the prejudices of my sin. Well, let us swap horses for three months and then swap impressions. Let each look out, for that short space, through the eyes of the other. Let each admit, frankly and without shame, that he may be wrong, and make an honest effort to find the truth.

This plan I propose in perfect seriousness, and stand ready, on 10 days’ notice, to carry out my share of it. I agree to touch no Rum, in any shape or form, for a period of three months. And I promise on my honor to give the Hon. Mr. Anderson a faithful account of the amount I commonly consume. What is more, I give him the privilege of reducing that amount if he thinks it beyond his stamina, or of augmenting it in case he feels that he ought to get more reward for his martyrdom. And I propose a public committee of fair men, consisting, let us say, of a clergyman, a physician and a respectable bartender, to manage and referee the contest and to take down in writing the remarks of the contestants at its close.

The Hon. Dan Loden, who made Col. Jacobus Hook second vice-president of the Concord Club, is now going about the City Hall hinting broadly that the club needs a new parlor carpet and 40 sets of dominos. Respondez, Jacques!--Adv.

The ancient and hunkerous Mr . Wegg, suffragan of Havre de Grace, in partibus infidelium, gives an affecting exhibition of moral side-stepping in today’s Letter Column. Why, when Havre de Grace was alive with blacklegs, and the good deacons were soaking them $12 a week for $4 board, and all the Prominent Citizens and Leading Lawyers of the vicinage were banded together to defend gambling–why did sweet Wegg maintain such a magnificent dumbness then? Simply, it appears, because he was “a firm believer in the efficacy of law.” Simply because he was “not a moralist.”

With all due respect, Bosh! Wegg is actually a moralist of the moralists, a general practitioner of enormous and fearful practice. He has been at the bat almost constantly for two or three years, putting staggering straight drives into this sin or that, flooring t’other one with a well-aimed foul. But when Vice reared her awful head in his own back yard--when Harford county painted her face and began to wink at sinful strangers--then the good bishop retired to his storm-cellar like a man of sense and discretion, amd was heard of no more.

As for the rest of his philippic, I leave it to posterity. From facts I have set forth, more in sorrow than in anger, he deduces the theory that the vice crusaders are hypocrites--and then alleges that I myself have accused them. Not so. I have made no such accusation. Nor have I ever called them whited sepulchres, or hinted that they were whited sepulchres, or even thought that they were whited sepulchres. To make it clear, I now categorically deny that they are whited sepulchres. They are all white and many of them are sepulchural, but they are not whited sepulchres. Neither is Wegg. Neither am I.

There remains the dear chorepiscopus’ allegation that I am not honest. Well, who disputes it? Have I myself ever done so? I think not. On the contrary, it seems to me that I printed a whole column of apt and irresistible argument, no longer ago than last Tuesday, in an effort to prove that no man is honest, and especially no moralist. My one complaint against the moralists is that they deny it, that they presume absurdly to a perfection impossible to mere man. If they would admit their human weakness, I should praise them and love them well. But when they set up the doctrine that they are impeccable and infallible, when they pretend to a degree of sapience and virtue rare even among archangels, then I fall upon that doctrine with loud, lewd cries and seek to make it a hissing and a mocking.

Medullacaput, n, one who pays taxes gladly and in full, a marrowhead.

Subscribe to the Democratic Telegram’s Joe Gans fund.--Adv.