Baltimore Evening Sun (23 December 1912): 6.

Remark of an anonymous bravo who puts me to the torture in this week’s Suffrage News:

I am not going to sign my name to this letter–not because I am ashamed of it, but because I refuse to be led around by the nose by [the Hon.] Mr. Mencken.

I hereby make the public accusation that the virtuous Dr. Hooker wrote this letter himself, and if not as author, then at least as amanuensis.

The Hon. William H. Anderson in the estimable Evening Sunpaper:

If the Free Lance insists upon the correctness of his prison statistics [showing the relation between alcohol and crime] he concedes the validity of mine, which are more sweeping and better authenticated. If he admits the truth of my statement that prisoners are likely to lie, in order to destroy my statistics, his own go down in the common wreck.

With all due respect to the darndest dialectician of them all, Pish! Ask yourself, dear friend, this one question: is it more likely that a prisoner who was brought to crime by drink will deny it and so put the whole blame on his native viciousness than it is that a prisoner who was brought to crime by his viciousness will put the blame on drink, and so win the smpathy and help of the pious? Let me go further. That is to say, let me change “more likely” to “as likely,” or even into “half as likely.”

The truth is, of course, that it is seldom wise to believe a crook when he blames drink for his doings, save in the presence of overwhelming corroborative evidence. He knows that this is the sort of tune that mushy moralists delight to hear, and he knows that if he pipes it pathetically enough it will profit him. The judge will melt, the jury will melt, the pardoning powers will melt. No wonder the defense of drunkenness is so often made! No wonder almost every wrongdoer is willing to admit, and even to swear on his halidom,that Rum corrupted his otherwise pure spirit.

But consider the opposite case. Can you imagine a man who actually led into crime by drink denying it afterward? Can you imagine such a fellow taking on his owm shoulders all the blame properly belonging to Rum? If you can, then I hail you an an imaginative artist of noble parts. Such gifts I do not possess myself. I fly so close to the earth, I am so little romantic, I am so much a groundling that I am not equal to such dizzy flights of credulity. With which words I wish the Hon. Mr. Anderson a merry Christmas and lament that he will find it so dry.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Find a barber and you’ll find a bad barber!

The Hon. Phillips Lee Goldsborough to the members of the Bethany Episcopal Sunday school:

We must have Christian men, and if we can secure enough of them, by their efforts alone we will clean both the city and State of all forms of vice. Legislation cannot bring about this result–it must be done by the upbuilding of morals.

Advice to the fair Torquemadas of the Suffrage News: Stop! Look! Listen!

The Concord Club has decided to invite the Hon.Woodrow Wilson to its annual ball. He will be received by a committee headed by the Hon. Jacobus Hook and wearing full-dress evening dress suites.--Adv.

Direct your eye to the letter of young Mr. George T. Warren in today’s Letter Column. On December 11 George favored The Evening Sun with the following:

“Fanny’s First Play,” Shaw’s latest, is a revel of rot and rudeness, the disgraceful attempt of a degenerate to reform a degenerated audience by slapplng slime in their faces.

On December 13 I called attention to the intolerable mendacity of this charge, and on Decebber 19 I did so again. Young George is now heard in his own defense. That defense of his consists, in the main, of a lot of pious rumble-bumble about the “pure in heart.” Secondly, he expresses surprise that I didn’t laugh at his impudent and ignorant slander. Thirdly, he pleads his infancy.

I devote space to this priggish young bearer of false witness simply because he appears to be an almost perfect specimen of the militant moralist in embryo. Let him keep on making libelous and indecent charges against his betters, and he will end, I believe, as the greatest vice- crusader Baltimore has ever seen. He is already greatly gifted. All he needs is a bit more experience to make him a brave and famous slanderer of the police.

Meanwhile, let every civilized Baltimorean mark well the true worth of moral testimony. Just as young George, drunk with his own virtue, makes false and abominable allegations against a play he has never seen, just so do many braying jackasses of our fair city, in and out of the pulpit, make extravagant and dirty charges against the theatres they never enter and the stage- women they do not know. Mark well these virtuosi. Ask yourself, beloved, whether the vileness they talk about is in the thing they slander or in their own “pure” minds.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another!

The Maryland Suffrage News in defense of its late advocacy of judicial murder and mayhem:

Cable reports state that in Wuchang users of the drug [opium] who are under 40 years of age will be executed, while those above 40 will be imprisoned for life. Such legislation, terribly severe as it is, is the result of emughtened public opinion.

Once more the needs of controversy are met by a mere statement of the fair crusaders’ case.

The Hon. Dan Loden, chairman of the Concord Club’s ball committee, has issued an order forbidding the wearing of dress suits and lemon-colored shoes in combination. Singly, of course, they still go.--Adv.

Tip for the Society for the Alleged Suppression of Vice:

In the main lobby of the Central Y. M. C. A. Building, and visible from the public highway, there is a portralt of a so-called lady with one shoulder bare.

Irreverent remark of the licentios Evening Sunpaper:

There is little doubt that [the Hon.] Mr. McCay [McCoy] will follow the wishes of Mayor Preston.

What an injustice to a man who has always shown the loftiest independence, and has constantly refused to give jobs to the super-Mahon’s political pediculidæ! What a slap at a pure spirit, a brave city official, a man of almost zymotic self-respect!

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Glass houses need no accusers!