Baltimore Evening Sun (14 January 1913): 6.

The citizen applying for a dog license at the Hon. Dan Loden’s office has to see not less than three different functtionaries, all of whom are members of the chairless Concord Club. But they are so suave and genial that he leaves them in a glow of joy, and often forgets both the license and his change.--Adv.

GEORGE 18 IN LINE.

The more I hear of the arguments against the extension of suffrage, the more convinced I grow that women should have the vote.--The Hon. George Ade.

The high scorn heaped upon the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus in the current issue of the Democrat Telegram, the Hon. the super-Mahon’s false whiskers, is sufficient evidence that the super-Mahon himself will never ask the Hon. Satan Anderson to help him to the United States Senate. In brief, he makes a declaration, and with considerable frankness for timid d a man, against the pious bosh of the local optionists, and, thereby, if I make no mistake, he drives the Hon. John Walter Smith to vote for the Kenyon bill.

If John Walter votes against that intolerable and indecent measure, he will lose many Eastern Shore votes to Isaac Lobe without making any corresponding gains in the sinful city, for the super-Mahon will be standing on his platform here. But if he votes for it, he will reduce Isaac Lobe to innocuous desuetude, and perhaps come to the city with a majority large enough to overcome the probable majority of the super-Mahon. In any event, Isaac Lobe will be disposed of, and so the subsequent proceedings will resolve themselves into a mere battle of barrels. And at that sort of warfare it may be presumed without invidious comparisons that John Walter hath no little skill.

Meanwhile, one thing is to be kept in mind, and that is the considerable strength of local option sentiment in the city. A majority, true enough, is still against the Andersonian fallacy, but it is not nearly so large as it used to be. The people of Baltimore are very susceptible to moral infections; they are now apt to fall into dry convulsions at any minute. Only an actual trial of local option, I fear, will ever convince them that it is pecksniffian, nonsensical, corrupting and a failure. Only a taste of the blind pig will reconvert them to the kaif.

And meanwhile, it is also interesting to observe how the scramble for the two Senatorships is resolving itself into a mere clown’s show, with the Hon. Mr. Anderson cracking the whip. ’Twas ever thus from childhood’s happy hour. We of Maryland do not choose our Senators in Congress for their intellectual stature, but merely for their political agility. Even a first-rate man, if he would do a service in the upper house, must get down on his hands and knees and prove the plasticity of his sinews. We regard the whole thing, not as a solemn business, but as a sort of public sport or game, not unrelated to baseball, pie-eating contests and the vice crusade.

Dr. Howard A. Kelly on the grand jury’s hunkerous objections to the vice crusade:

It is a body of men who know nothing, absolutely nothing, about the business of segregation.

Well, let us admit it for the sake of argument. But does Dr. Kelly make the same charge against Mr. Grannan, Mr. Grgurevich and Captain Logan, all of whom are also opposed to dispersion? Does he maintain, for example, that he himself is better acquainted with the workings and effects of segregation than Mr. Grannan? Or that Dr. O. Edward Janney knows more about the white slave trade than Mr. Grgurevich? Or that his clerical associates–for example, the Rev. Dr. Oliver Huckel--have a better understanding of ways and means for saving the fallen woman than Captain Logan?

I doubt it. Dr. Kelly is a reasonable man, but his bias is so strong that it constantly corrupts his juddgment. He accepts any evidence of the moralists, however absurd, and denies any evidence of practical men, however persuasive. Thus he falls into the untenable poisition of questioning the intelligence of such investigators as Havelock Ellis, Brand Whitlock and Mayor Gaynor. These men, let me point out, are not professed advocates of segregation: they are merely critics of reckless dispersion. What they argue, in brief, is that the social evil can never be disposed of by anathema or with a syllogism; they seek to show the enormous complexity of the problem and to demonstrate the impossibility of solving it by simple fiat.

It seems to me that they make out a case. Going further, it seems to me very significant that such men as Mr. Grannan, Mr. Grgurevich and Captain Logan agree with them. These men, I am sure, are not enemies of morality. They are not defenders of prostitution. If they have any predisposition, it is obviously against the lawbreaker. All three of them have given their best years to the reduction of the perils and consequences of public vice. And yet they stand solidly against the panacea of the vice crusaders, and not only hold it to be vain, but also hold it to be positively dangerous.

It is all well enough for such a man as Dr. Hunkel, emerging occasionally from his comfortable study, to tell the people of Baltimore what ought to be done. But as for me, I am more inclined to listen to Captain Logan’s view of what can be done. Captain Logan, so far as I know, has no study and is not a composer of moral tracts. Day in and day out, he is up to his hips in the muck of life, trying his best to save the lost and hopeless. When he comes up for air, bringing evidence with him, I am inclined to grant the appositeness and force of that evidence. And when he ventures upon a deduction from it, I am inclined to assume his good faith.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Bare your arms!

Astounding allegation of the sanguinary Maryland Suffrage News:

We are living in a community in which most women are monagamous, and in which most men are polygamous * * *

Bosh! Not one man in forty is polygamous, save in the sense that a remarried widower is polygamous. This intolerably libellous charge is one that is constantly made by theoretical moralists, but it has no more truth in it than the other charges they make. It becomes plausible only upon the assumption that the civilized white man is utterly lacking in any sense of the inviolability of contract, and as utterly lacking in fastidiousness. No such assumption is supported by the facts.