Baltimore Evening Sun (9 January 1913): 6.

Ungrammatical but flattering remark of the estimable Maryland Suffrage News:

The invectives hurled at the present vice crusade by many good but light-thinking individuals is a case in point.

I single out the word “good” and hug it to my buzzom. No epithet could be more grateful to the soul, even when diluted with “light-thinking,” or even with “light-headed.” The Hon. the super-Mahon, in the course of his wildest debauches of self-praise, has never applied any more soothing and slippery adjective to himself. To be good may be very painful—I do not know: I have never tried it—but to be thought good and called good is a sweet, sweet business. Most persons, I daresay, would far rather be called good than be good.

Which brings us to a curious thing in psychology. I allude to the hot rage of sinners to confess their sins, and their equally hot rage against all who accuse them. Nothing gives the average man more comfort than to admit in sepulchral tones that he is not as good as he might be, and yet nothing gives him more offense than to hear that same verdict pronounced upon him by others. Start a campmeeting on the City Hall plaza and you would have nine-tenths of the City Councilmen on the mourners’ bench in half an hour, beating their breasts, leaking tears by the lake and estuary, and confessing to sins innumerable and unimaginable. And yet these same gentlemen get into a rage every time the newspapers question their virtue, and are even peeved by the purely formal and self-evident allegation that they are donkeys.

ED HIRSCH JOINS.

Give me one sound reason why women shouldn’t vote at elections, as they already vote in labor unions, and I’ll give you your pick of my vulcanized, seagoing diamonds.—The Hon. Edward Hirsch.

From the licentious Evening Sunpaper of yesterday:

Following the example set by Mayor Gaynor of New York and Mayor Blankenburg of Philadelphia, Mayor Preston will make his annual message [to the Job Hounds] brief. Altogether it will cover, perhaps, not more than two or three printed pages.

An unwelcome innovation. Certainly we are not to be deprived of the customary spectacle of a contumacious press put to the torture, of the modern Blackstone teaching the judiciary how to suck eggs, of the greatest living pathologist disposing of typhoid with a syllogism, of the cerebral Vesuvius spouting sulphurous smoke and cinders, of the prima donna martyr in full cry and recital! If we miss that show, we miss a show, indeed!

To the Hon. Tom Jones, who argues earnestly in today’s Letter column that an advocate of oppressive laws, while undoubtedly an ass, is not necessarily a rogue, I presume to address a brief question—to wit: What is the difference between a man who tries to steal my pocketbook and one who tries to steal my liberty? For the life of me, I can see none. I admit freely that there is an undoubted subjective difference: the pickpocket is aware that he is a rogue, whereas the moral tyrant is convinced that he is a saint, but that difference cannot be stated in objeetive terms. It is just as disagreeable to me, and just as much an invasion of my common rights, to take away my personal freedom as it is to take away my cash.

I offend no sane man by carrying $2.25 in my pocket and I offend no sane man by going to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on Sunday. It is the duty of civilized society to protect me in both acts, and any man who interferes with my clear right to perform them injures me. Both the pickpocket and the moral tyrant are inspired by wholly selfish motives. The one gets my money; the other gets the satisfaction of bossing me against my will. Both seek a profit at my expense. Both do me gratuitous and indefensible damage.

The Hon. Tom Jones must remember that roguery is not limited in scope and in meaning to obvious violations of the law. The law, indeed, is often a rogue itself—as, for example, when it grants favors to politicians, or lays unjust taxes upon the people, or interferes unrighteously with their common rights. And the men who carry it into such excesses are rogues too. I am not in favor of dividing such men into the just and the unjust, the palpably scoundrelly and the presumably benign. I see no difference whatever between a legislator who helps to make an inquisitorial and unrighteous law for cash in hand and a legislator who helps to make it for the joy he gets out of rowelling and torturing his fellow-men.

Bishop Wegg, of Havre de Grace, gives solemn notice to the public, in today’s Letter Column, that he read the essay “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill. An affecting proof of culture, of a hot thirst for learning. But has Wegg ever gone to the length of reading the same author’s “System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive?”

Hot spies come rushing to me with news that that Anti-Saloon League and the Lord’s Day Alliance are at odds over the rake-off—that their respective wiskinskis do not speak. Alas, I see nothing astonishing in such tidings. The moral taxpayer, for all his virtue, cannot make one dollar do the work of two. Once he has paid his tithes to one wiskinski, he must have only a sweet smile left for the other. And a sweet smile butters no parsnips.

Bilious remark of a torquemadan suffragette in yesterday’s Letter Column:

All of the people present at the hanging described by [the Hon.] Mr. Mencken * * * were men. The presence of several of these gentlemen was wholly superfluous, including that of [the Hon.] Mr. Mencken himself.

Exactly. And the absence of the suffragattes, by the same token, was wholly inexcusable. There was their supreme chance to master the difficult technique of their chosen art—and they stayed away! Where were they? Half of them, I hear, were at a white goods sale in Lexington street. The other half remained in garrison at 317 North Charles street, eating chocolates, manufacturing sophistries and reading the works of George Barr McCutcheon.

Of the two principal newspaper baiters of this town, I presume to give my personal reverence and applause to my distinguished friend, the Hon. Eugene O’Dunne, LL.B. The Archangel Harry has his points, true enough, but after all his assaults are chiefly yells for help, and hence ridiculous. But the Hon. Mrs. O’Dunne has ingenuity and audacity, and what is more, humor; and humor, in a public bravo, is almost as rare as sense.