Baltimore Evening Sun (3 January 1913): 6.

To those who have any interest in the discussion of charity now going on in The Evening Sun let me recommend a little book by Dr. J. Rosett, of this city, lately published by the author. Its title is “The Middle Class” and it is in the form of a four-act play. I doubt that this play will ever see the boards in America, for it is entirely lacking in that sentimental flubdub which our theatregoers demand, but all the same it seems to me to be a very important contribution to the serious American drama, for it grapples bravely with genuine problems and it brings to them a considerable originality and acuteness of thought. Such plays are common enough in Germany and Scandinavia, and even in France and England, but so far not many of them have been written in the United States.

Rosett’s story is simple enough. Its central character, Dr. Bensal, is not a dashing youth, not a hero a la James K. Hackett, but a pathologist. He has spent a dozen years of his life, at the princely stipend of $1,500 a year, seeking a cure for cholera infantum. Then, at 40, he is dragged from his laboratory and made Health Commissioner of a large city, at an advance of $3,500. But this sudden prosperity does not corrupt him: he carries into office the clear, unemotional thinking of the man of science. That is to say, he still devotes himself chiefly to the causes of disease, and shows little interest in the more spectacular battle with their effects. He is not long on statistics and advice, but he is long on cleaning up.

Foolish man! Immersed for years in his laboratory, applying his eye incessantly to his microscope, he has neglected to observe and study the organization and temper of bourgeois society. Now, to his cost, he begins to learn. He finds that his prying into first causes, a virtue to a pathologist, is an unpardonable indiscretion in a public official. He finds that the cold truth, administered without anæsthetics, causes pain too damnable to be borne. When he strikes at foul slums he brings down the wrath not only of the property owners, but also of the tenants. And when he strikes at tainted food he finds quickly and to his amazement that its principal sellers are also the principal virtuosi of charity, the celebrated friends and saviors of the poor. With all classes against him his fall is inevitable: a manufactured scandal gives him his quietus. And some “better” fellow gets his job.

Dr. Rosett’s idea, of course, is clear enough. What he is trying to show, and what he does show, is that there is little of permanent value in amelioration, that the one sound way to battle with human misery is to strike at its sources. But is such in attack possible? Theoretically, it certainly is--but practically? I doubt it. The influence of the vast majority is always bitterly against it. The poor protest against the invasion of their liberties, and the rich protest against the scandal, and particularly against its alleged bad effect upon business. Here in Baltimore we have so much evidence of the fact that it would be useless to pile up examples. The Mayor of the city denounces the newspapers for calling attention to the prevalence of typhoid fever, and gives his solemn word that the obvious is not true. The principal commercial body assures the country that we have no slums. And our professional Prominent Citizens, whenever a cry is raised against squalor and disease and corruption, jam on the soft pedal in the name of trade.

All the same, it would be unjust to denounce these preposterous mountebanks as conscious hypocrites. As a matter of fact, most of them, in their own view and in that of society, are humane and intelligent men. They give liberally to charity. They are in favor of every reform which doesn’t raise the tax rate. They believe sincerely that every raid upon established custom, and particularly upon established hoggishness, hurts business, and that no city can survive such damage. Their ideal is commercial prosperity, and they are determined to get it if half of humanity must rot for it.

Thus the vicious circle is completed and human beings go spinning around it like squirrels in a cage. On the one hand, half of the population is permitted to live in filth and wretchedness, and so propagate poverty and disease. On the other hand, elaborate efforts are made to relieve and disguise the inevitable effects. Every charity worker knows that illness is, by long odds, the greatest of all causes f poverty. And yet our communal war upon poverty, for all our progress, remains principally a war upon its effects, and not upon its causes. The one thing we have done in fifyy years to relieve the intolerable swinishness and disease-breeding of the negroes in our alleys is to lay a penalty upon the stray negro who has energy and intelligence enough to move out.

Such ideas you will find in Dr. Rosett’s thoughtful little play, and you will find them worked out with intellectual honesty, a quality so rarely encountered in Baltimore that it is a wonder the jackasses of the City Council don’t penalize it. The doctor is a Socialist, but he doesn’t preach the panaceas of Socialism. His argument, indeed, is far more destructive than constructlve, and at the end his pathologist protagonist seems to have no very definite plan of reform, save the obvious one of education. But his play, for all that, is well worth your reading. It attacks the common assumptions vigorously, and if it does not actually dispose of them, it at least raises doubts of their truth.

Characteristic exaggeration of the moral and torquemadan suffragettes:

The social evil, with its consequent diseases, is more fatal to the race than any amount of opium-eating can be.

So? But suppose every man, woman and child in the world should eat a peck of opium tomorrow? Or even half a peck? Or even an ounce?

Will the suffragettes ever cease their grotesque overstatement of their case? Listen to them five minutes--or to any healthy vice crusader--and you will begin to fancy that every man in Christendom is hopelessly diseased, and that every woman is dying in a hospital. There is, of course, not 1 per cent. of truth in this picture. The fried beefsteak and the fear of bathing have killed 7.287654 times as many Americans as alcohol and the so-called social diseases combined. Add soothing syrups, pork, false teeth and medicated lingerie, and the ratio rises to 16.4536748564786453652 to 1.

Final report of the Dashing Harry Monument Fund Committee:

Collected from health wardens, city depositories, paving contractors and City Hall charwomen.....................$17.85
Spent for refreshments........................................................ 17.65

Read the Maryland Suffrage News and enjoy an innocent guffaw.—Adv.