Baltimore Evening Sun (2 January 1913): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

From the moral Towel’s account of the New Year’s Eve revels in Baltimore:

One of the hotels counted $600 in the cash register of the bar alone after the last guest had left for home. That was money spent over the bar and had nothing to do with orders from tables in the dining room.

Saturnine comment of the Hon. Satan Anderson:

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you go dry!

Mrs. Donald R. Hooker in defense of the suffragette propaganda for the repression of vice by hanging and mutilation:

People can be legislated into virtue. After the habit of horse-stealing had been broken up by “shocking” punishment, it was no longer necessary for the community to put on the screws so hard, for the horse-stealing proclivities of the average man had been eliminated.

With all due respect to a talented logician, Pish! The “habit of hoirse-stealing” was never broken up by capital punishment, and capital punishment was not reduced to imprisonment because it had been broken up. As a matter of fact, the habit survives down to our own day, though I admit that it has greatly diminished since its punishment became mild. Go to the Maryland Penitentiary and you will still find a few horse thieves there--not many, of course, but enough, nevertheless, to give a dignified representation to an ancient and once eminent profession.

If horse-stealing has declined in Maryland, that decline is certainly not to be laid to the gay butchery of the suffragettes’ dreams. As a matter of fact, the punishment for the crime has been simple imprisonment for 168 years–to be precise, since 1744. What is more, the duration of that imprisonment has been gradually reduced from generation to generation, until now the minimum for the commonest form of horse-stealing is but six months in jail. And yet, despite that persistent amelioration of the rigors of the law, horse-stealing has not increased. On the contrary, it has diminished.

And why? Simply because means of prevention have grown more numerous and certain. It is stillpossible to steal a horse in Maryland, but it is no longer an easy thing. In the old days, all a thief had to do was to jump upon a horse’s back and gallop off. If he had picked up the fastest horse from the stable, which the expert usually did, he got away scott free. But today the thing is more difficult, Railroad trains, automobiles and motorcycles can go faster than the fastest horse, and the telegraph and telephone are faster still. Besides, why steal a horse when it is so much easier to steal a ride on a train? The result is that horse-stealing has become an onerous and unprofitable profession, and so it is avoided by all save the super-romantic and the imbecile. Find me a horse thief and I will find you a very foolish fellow.

In brief, the pursuit of horse-stealing has been discouraged, not by making its punishment more cruel, but by reducing its temptations. It has ceased to be fatal, but it has also ceased to be charming. That is the one sure way, I believe, to diminish all ordinary crimes and vices. Convince ant sane man that alcohol does him 10 times as much harm as good and you do not have to hang him for drunking: he will stop of his own accord. And–to come closer to the suffragettes’ jehad–rob any worse crime of its romance, and you will also rob it of a large percentage of its votaries.

But the suffragettes think otherwise. In the matter of the social evil, for example, they propose to proceed in two ways. First, they propose to disguise and disperse the prostitute and so make her romantic and alluring, and, secondly, they propose to murder every man who succumbs to her lures. To me, at least, this seems a wholly fatuous and ridiculous scheme. Why not try something simpler and saner? That is to say, why not make the prostitute as unromantic as possible--by segregating, regulating and plainly labeling her--and then trust to the fastidiousness and common sense and self-respect of men?

But some men are not fastidious! Some men have no common sense! Some have no self- respect! True enough. But that is merely saying that the world is not perfect! It is also perfectly true that some men have no honesty. But what of it? We are here discussing, not extraordinarily degraded and vicious men but average men. Give the average man a fair chance, and he will remain pretty honest. Despite Mrs. Hooker, he has no “horse-stealing proclivities” and never had any. And keep him out of the way of strong temptation, and he will remain reasonably virtuous. His vices, like his crimes, are not entirely subjective phenomena. It takes an external suggestion of considerable force to draw him from the narrow path. He is not inherently vicious, but inherently decent.

But the suffragettes propose to save him by increasing his temptations! They want to surround him by harpies disguised as yielding innocents, and so excite in him that egotistical love of conquest which is the weakness of all normal men. And then they want to butcher him if he succumbs. What puerile nonsense! As well require banks to store their cash on their front steps, and then hang any man who smouches a dollar!

From a bulletin of the North Carolina Board of Health:

Liquor is to blame for twice as many deaths a year as are caused by typhoid fever.

That is to say, in civilized communities. But not in Baltimore. Here the Rum Demon is hopelessly outclassed by Typhoid the Strong Man. There is, indeed, no contest between them, and if there were the police would stop it. Rum may be a viper, but even a viper has the equal protection of the laws.

However, things are improving in Baltimore, and no doubt typhoid will gradually decrease in future. But the city will never be able to hold up its head among the great cities of the earth until its death rate from typhoid is surpassed by its death rate from drink. In New York there is twice as much delirium tremens as typhoid. In Chicago there is three times as much and in Ptttsburgh there is 4.2 times as much. But Baltimore, alas, still lags behind.

So great is the Hon. Dan Loden’s charm of manner that last year he collected $263 more water rent than the taxpayer owed.--Adv.

The pious Havre de Grace deacons start the New Year with gratifying bank accounts and a comfortable glow in their hearts. Such are the rewards of virtue!

College yell of the impatient Concord Clubbers:

Three chairs for Col. Jacobus Hook!