Baltimore Evening Sun (1 January 1913): 6.

The Hon. Satan Anderson will have a hard time explaining away the card of thanks printed at the bottom of column seven on the first page of today’s Sunpaper. The advertiser is a former Baltimorean who came home from North Carolina for New Year’s and was unfortunately overcome by the fumes of liquor. In that lush state he wandered into a Fayette street kaif, carrying a large sum of money in his pocket. But did the waiters fall upon him and rob him, as the Hon. Mr. Anderson would have us believe? Did the bartender slay him with a bung-starter and go through his clothes? Did the kaif-keeper burke him and throw his carcass down a sewer?

Not at all. On the contrary, he was handled gently, relieved of his money, given a receipt for it and sent to a hospital. When he awoke next morning it was to the joyous discovery that every cent was safely locked in the kaif-keeper’s till. He had been treated, while suffering from gross and stupifying malaises, with the courtesy due an honored guest. He had been introduced, a helpless stranger, to the humanity and gemuethlichkeit which so beautifully characterize kaif life in Baltimore. And being a gentleman himself, he decided to give public thanks.

The one mistake this ex-Baltimorean made was in assuming that the benevolence he encountered was extraordinary. Not so. Such gentleness to the wounded stranger is the invariable rule in all first-class Baltimore kaifs. Elsewhere he is mauled and outraged. Let the Salvation Army get hold of him and it will exhibit him in public as a horrible example. Let him fall into the hands of the gendarmes, and they will lock him up with ganovs and wife-beaters, and ignorant turnkeys, practicing their crude osteopathy, will try to revive him by rubbing his ears, sticking pins under his finger-nails and paddling the soles of his feet. But in the kaif he is safe. His money will be taken from him and held on deposit at 3½ per cent. interest. He will be sent to a hospital for medical attention. His family will be supplied with regular bulletins of his progress.

Such is kaif life. Let the Hon. Mr. Anderson stay his libels of it. Let him admit in common frankness that it has its security, its virtues, its charm.

How I am quoted by the furious and inaccurate Suffrage News:

The red light district is a necessity.

Have I ever said anything of the sort, or even thought anything of the sort? Of course, I haven’t. The red light district is no more a necessity than Bright’s disease or astigmatism. It is perfectly possible to imagine a city without it. But it would be very difficult, I believe, to find a city without it–in some form or other, gathered in a clot or spread out thin. In brief, it seems to be inevitable, but a thing that is inevitable need not be a necessity.

What the inflammatory suffragettes try to convict me of is the crime of arguing that vice has a use—i. e., that it is necessary to the well-being of man. But I fall into no such error. I am too accomplished a hypocrite to be so ensnared. All I say of vice is that it exists, and that no human war upon it has ever disposed of it, or even appreciably diminished it. The one thing we can hope to do with it is to ameliorate its effects. But what the moralizing suffragettes propose to do is to intensify its effects. That is to say, they propose to add imprisonment, mutilation and hanging to the already terrible consequence of the particular vice they denounce. I regret that I cannot follow them. I find it impossible to view human weakness and suffering with so jaundiced an eye.

The loose use of the word “necessity” is one of the chronic crimes of these singularly savage girls. In the same issue of the Suffrage News I find the following:

What the vice crusaders mean to teach the public * * * is the necessity of clean, moral lives.

More balderdash. As a matter of fact, morality is no more a necessity than immorality. A man may dabble in a score of vices for years and years, and yet suffer no noticeable damage thereby, and die eventually to the sweet sound of public lamentation. It has been done over and over again. If the suffragettes question it, I shall be glad to give them names and dates--of course, in the strictest confidence.

But this possibility, I grant freely, does not attain to the virulence of a probability. That is to say, the chances are always against the experimenter. He may get through in safety, true enough, but then again he may come to sudden grief and suffer irreparable damage. Persons who perform upon the B flat cornet are sometimes murdered by the neighbors; tobacco chewers have been known to choke to death at minstrel shows or on the judicial bench. Which brings us to the real truth about virtue: if it is not necessary, it is at least advisable. The good man, taking one thing with another, is more to be envied than the bad man. He is more apt to win public respect while he lives, and his mind is likely to be more tranquil when he faces death. In brief, he makes a more prudent bargain with life than a bad man, for he gets more than he gives up.

But prudence, it must be obvious, is not a universal human trait, nor even a common one. The average man is an ass. The average woman has little more sense than the average trained sea lion. Of all the men I know, not one is without gross and incredible follies. I myself play the fool at least 10 times a day, and sometimes as much as 100 times. No honest man, reviewing his day at bedtime, can help feeling like a donkey. The result is that all sorts of vices, some of them mild enough, but others very dangerous, flourish in the world.

Congratulations to the Hon. Robert J. McCuen upon his survival a capella. I hope I violate no confidence when I report that he was thrice at the very brink of matrimony during 1912. Once he was pursued by a widow lady who sent her six small children to his office daily to work upon his sympathies and break down his courage. Again, he was courted through six strenuous weeks by one of the prime donne of the Metropolitan Opera Company. In the third place, a suffragette tried to kiss him in public at the annual ball of the Concord Club. But he passed through all these storms of Leap Year, and a multitude of lesser ones, absolutely unscathed. He starts 1913 a carefree and happy bachelor, with money in 17 banks.

One million dollars in cash to anyone who will come forward with one good reason for refusing women the suffrage. Two dollars to anyone who will come forward with a plausible bad reason.