Baltimore Evening Sun (7 March 1913): 6.

Dr. R. M. Sterett, in the Chicago Medical Times for January, 1910:

Coffee is a drug in the same sense that hyoscyamus, opium, nux vomica, cocoa and conium ore drugs * * * We all know the first effect of alcohol upon the nervous and circulatory systems--that of a so-called stimulation, followed by a depressing or narcotic action and later by reaction, in which the ill-treated nerves strugglee to resume their normal equilibrium. Repeated doses require larger anounts to produce the first stimulating effect, followed by increasing cellular disturbance and greater reactionary depression. SO WITH COFFEE. * * * Coffee drunkenness is a commoner failing than the whisky habit.

Respectfully referred, for review and report, to the Hon. Eugene Levering, candidate for Congress on the Prohibition ticket, canon of the Anti-Saloon League, reviler of brewers, and founder of the firm of E. Levering & Co., coffee importers.

The local suffragettes continue their loud whooping for Major Sylvester’s scalp, and will not rest content, I suppose, until it is duly nailed to the barn-door. The enterprise is one that must needs make a strong appeal to them, for on the one hand it satisfies their chronic yearning to butcher somebody, and on the other hand it enables them to appear in the guise of martyrs. As they repeat and improve the tale of last Monday’s parade. it becomes a moving chronicle of assault and battery. Some of the more heroic of them, I dare say, will presently appear upon the streets in splints and plaster casts. A few, perhaps, will have themselves carried to hospitals, and from there inflame the populace with the dreadful story of their sufferings.

As a matter of fact, there is no actual evidence that they were seriously manhandled by the crowd of drunks and ward heelers that swirled about them. I observed them very closely as they emerged from the turmoil on Pennsylvania avenue. I stood within 10 feet of them. I was humanely alert for signs of damage. But I could find none. Not a single suffragette in the whole parade showed a bruise, a cut or a black eye. Even their gowns and plumes were uninjured. Every float, some of them very elaborate and fragile, got through. Every banner continued to wave. Every band still had its cornets and its wind.

The experience, of course, was not pleasant. Many of the girls were undoubtedly hustled; many or the drunks in the crowd undoubtedlt ran to a low, vulgar sort of wit. But what would you? Would you come out of battle without a scratch, even without a psychic scratch? Is war, then, a parlor game? Is it possible to engage in combat without taking an occasional wallop and swallowing an occasional insult? I think not, and in support of my opinion I call all opponents of the suffragettes to the stand. These opponents know what it means to be reviled. They know the sharp sting of contumely. They have smelled the spear. They can show wounds. But do they weep, faint and cry for the police? They do not. They take the bitter with the sweet. They play the game according to the rules.

Even allowing the whole tale of assault and mayhem to be true, it still remains in bad taste for the suffragettes to make such a pother over it. They themselves, in the conduct of their jehad, have displayed a degree of ferocity perhaps unmatched in Christendom since the Middle Ages. They have advocated laws which, by their own showing, would hand nine-tenths of all male voters ovr to the public executioner. They have joined forces with all the bogus moralists and brummagem Dowies who now yell for gore. And yet they shake the earth with their complaints when a drunken man spits upon their flag and another drunken man calls them “chickens”! Certainly absurdity could go no further. Certainly it is impossible to imagine any more lamentable exhibition of bad sportsmanship.

Meanwhile, the campaign against Major Sylvester makes the public forget the genuine success of Monday’s parade and so destroys its enormous propagandist value. The people of the United States, reading all the current tales of assault and insult, will conclude, and quite naturally, that the suffragettes were mobbed, that their demonstration was a ridiculous fiasco. As a matter of fact, it was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it was a great success--a noble and impressive evidence of strength and dignity--a devastating blow to the antis. No wonder those antis now join in the demand for Sylvester’s scalp! No wonder they try to promote the idea that the whole affair was a joke, a burlesque, an ignominious rout!

The Hon. Eagle Eye, an anonymously persistent and persistently anonymous bravo, returns to his defense of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in today’s Letter Column by arguing that the German patriotic song, “Deutschland, Ueber Alles” is even worse. A bad defense, and for two reasons, the first being that “Deutschland, Ueber Alles” is not the German national anthem, and the second being that it is not worse. Let me present an accurate translation of the first strophe, to offset his clumsy and libelous one:

Germany, Germany, over all, over all in the world, When it ever for defense and offense brotherly together holds; From the Mass unto the Meml, from the Etsch unto the Baltio, Germany, Germany, over all, over all in the world!

Is this braggadocio? Is this comparable to an idle bellow about “the land of the free” and “the home of the brave”? I think not. On the contrary, I see in it only a summons to unity, a clear call to all Germans to stand together against the common foe–in brief, the rallying cry of a brave and intelligent people. They do not say that they are brave. They do not argue that they are braver than other folks. All they maintain in this noble stanza, with its perfect music by Joseph Haydn, is that they are aware of the benefits of organization, that they believe in union as the first essential of national security.

The Hon. Eagle Eye’s translation, like his argument, is childish and nonsensical. Where does he get “it’s proud banner furled”? From “bruederlich zusammen haelt”? If so, then let him go back to his Erste Fibel, his German horn-book. And meanwhile, let him also take notice that the German national anthem is not “Deutschland, Ueber Alles,” but “Die Wacht am Rhein.” The melody of the former, true enough, is used for the Austrian national anthem, “Gott Erhalte Franz der Kaiser,” but Germany is not Austria. Nor is German patriotism cheap braggadocio.

Jacques Levy Offenbach, composer of “Madame Favart” and “La Belle Helene,” died 32 years five months and four days ago today. What a pity he didn’t live to set the Harry petition to music!