Baltimore Evening Sun (10 December 1912): 6.

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

I * * * determined that no public servant should be discharged because another wanted his place.

Oh, la, la! Oh, hoochie-coochie! Oh, asparagus viniagrette!

My estimable friend, the Hon. William H. Anderson, makes a dignified declination, in today’s Letter Column, of my offer to exchange habits and pulpits with him for three calendar months. His principal reason you will find in the following passage:

Assuming that I could get back on the water wagon after having once stepped off, nobody would beneve that it was genuine or permanent, and I would have lost standing with one side without gaining it with the other.

To be frank, I am constrained to admit the force and cogency of this argument and of the first part of it even more than of the second part. That is to say, I grant that it would be extremely difficult for the Hon. Mr. Anderson, or for any other man of his health and sanity, to climb back upon the water wagon after straying experimentally into the smiling fields of bibbing. Going further, I believe that it would be downright impossible. Once aware, by personal experience, of the gentle joys resident in the moderate use of alcohol, and of the entire harmlessness of the habit, he would cease forthwith his whooping against the Rum Demon and take his discreet toddy to the end of his happy days.

Such was my theory when I issued my challenge, and I may as well confess at once that I harbored the deliberate intent of breaking down the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s austerity. Since he was too alert to be snared, I can only abandon the enterprise in despair, giving him over forever to his bilious and painful asceticism. Drinking water, he is a man of conspicuous and arresting merits: a resourceful dialectician, a fluent orator, a composer of chaste and incisive English, a dignified survivor of scandal, the least obnoxious of moralists. But what a man he would be with his legs under the table. and a seidel of Muenchener before him, and joy in his heart! Alas, that virtue is so wasteful, so cruel!

I am violating no confidence, I hope, when I intimate that Editor Aristides’ new paper will be in favor of the super-Mahon for Senator.

Don’t miss this week’s Maryland Suffrage News. It is devoted almost entirely to Vice, and on page 144 you will find a frank and naive description of the Remedy proposed by the estimable vice-crusaders. That Remedy includes hanging, mutilation and imprisonment, not to mention such minor things as the creation of a new and inquisitorial police force, the revision of all our present laws respecting marriage, the entire reorganization of our educational and industrial systems, the adoption of woman’s suffrage and the abolition of Rum. It is the first open and complete declaration of what the vice-crusaders propose to do, the first wholly perfect revelation of their bumptious and incredible folly, their frenzy to boom and torture, their absurd and intolerable ignorance of the difficulties and limitations of government.

It is a long while, believe me, since these eyes were delighted by a more satisfactory piece of nonsense. Read it and mark it well. Digest it at your leisure, paste it in your hat, smoke a cigar over it, and then ask yourself if persons who propose such balderdash, and are so cocksure about things they know nothing about, and so eager to inflict cruel and staggering punishments upon their fellow-beings, and so violent and ridiculous in their rages--ask yourself if such persons are safe agents for the carrying out of a reform of the first magnitude.

You can get the Suffrage News for five cents at the office of the Just Government League, 817 North Charles street.

Archosseocaput, n, a Prominent Baltimorean, a Prince of boneheads.

All honor to the Hon. James Harry Preston for his order prohibiting the exchange of Christmas gifts between municipal department heads amd their subordinates. No more evil and obnoxious form of graft could be imagined, and yet it flourished in the City Hall for many years. Men getting from $12 to $14 a week were taxed regularity and heavily to provide elaborate and hideous gifts for their bosses, and much ill feeling was engendered thereby, and the public service was damaged. The first department head to attack the ancient custom, if I remember rightly, was the Hon. Benjamin T. Fendall, then City Engineer. He notified his men that he would accept no Christmas gift from them, and so they fell from the custom of decorating his office with evergreens. The Mayor does well to extend the prohibition to all departments. Very few of the clerks in the City Hall are overpaid: the work they do may be useless, but they do not get rich doing it. It is outrageous to blackmail them out of heavy contributions at Christmas time, when they need every cent they are paid by the city.

New books that you had better not give at Christmas save to some one who has formally abandoned virtue:

“Hail and Farewell: Salve,” by George Moore. "A Night in the Luxembourg Garden,” by Remy de Gourmont, tr. by Arthur Ransome.

Don’t mistake me; these books are not indecent. (I wouldn’t have you waste your money for the world!) But they are highly heretical, and so you had better not give them to anyone without first looking through them.

Safe and sane books, suitable for any civilized person:

“Knocking the Neighbors,” by George Ade. “Elkan Lubliner: American,” by Montague Glass.

Bad novels, that are getting highly laudatory reviews in the newspapers:

“The Reef,” by Edith Wharton. “Broken Acres,” by Darrell Figgis.

The Concord Club needs.100 chairs for its new assembly hall. Three cheers for Col. Jacobus Hook!–Adv.

Coxinocaput, n, a soft, yielding, sentimental fellow; a cushion-head, a loosehead.

From the current issue of the Hon. Satan Anderson’s weekly paper:

Morals * * * are twofold and double-catalogued. One is ideal, theoretical, judicuary. The other is real, practical, executive.

An exact statement of the difference between local option and common sense.