Baltimore Evening Sun (2 April 1913): 6.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Help Goucher!

Beware, gents! The Hon. Mr. Schoenewolf may print a list of his customers!

Symbolic button to be worn by vice crusaders, theatre censors and the estimable snouters pf the Lord’s Day Alliance:

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The Hon. William H. Anderson’s proposal for the appointment of a committee to investigate the effect of local option and prohibition, set forth at length in today’s Letter Column, is full of the dark deceits which mark all of his challenges. He knows very well, and you know and I know, how difficult it is to get accurate information about blind pigs and suchlike fruits of malignant morality from the merchants, professional men and public officials of a community afflicted. He knows that these men will commonly deny the facts, (a) becaise they don’t want to injure their town, and (b) because they fear the savage revenges of the frenzied majority that is responsible for the hoggishness which prevails.

He knows again that the specific tests he proposes are grossly unfair and ridiculous--that even if Salisbury, Cambridge and such small towns show an apparently low jim-jams rate, the fact is no evidence that local option would accomplish anything in a large city like Baltimore--that the one large city he brings into court--Kansas City, Kan.--is directly connected with Kansas City, Mo., which is wet, and that all prohibition has accomplished for it is to make its people spend their trinkgeld across the Kansas river. In brief, the Hon. Mr. Anderson is well aware that all the dice in his cup are loaded--that the inquiry he proposes would be inapposite, nonsensical and profitless.

But all the same, I am not going to decline his challenge. On the contrary, I am going to accept it, for all its studied unfairness, and leave his proper punishment to his own conscience. He asks me to name, as one member of the proposed commission, “a representative business man who may be opposed to local option and may even be a moderate drinker, but is not directly interested in the liquor traffic.” It is a pleasure to nominate the Hon. Lloyd Wilkinson.

Some anonymous suffragette rages and roars in the current Suffrage News over the case of one Joshua Lutz, who was recently tried before Judge Dobler on a charge of assaulting little children--and acquitted by a jury. A perfect example of suffragettish hysteria and slobber-gobble. This Lutz, be it remembered, was acquitted. The jury that tried him concluded that he was innocent. The judge before whom he was tried discharged him from custody. And yet these savage ladies now raise a whoop because he is “at large * * * in the community,” and deplore the fate of the school-children who must “pass the alley where such a man may lurk.” Is it possible to imagine a more ridiculous and intolerable piece of nonsense? Is it possible to imagine a more scandalous attack upon a man guilty of no crime?

And yet that very note is constantly sounded in the Suffrage News. It seems to be the firm faith of the moralists who write for it that every man accused of crime is guilty and that a jury which brings in a verdict of not guilty is made up of criminals as bad as the fellow on trial. Let the sane citizens of Baltimore observe and ponder that theory. Let them decide how much there is of sense and fairness in the moral bellowing which now deafens us, and how much of fury and malignity. Is it the aim of these virtuosi to enforce the laws, or merely to find victims? Are they in favor of justice and right, or merely in favor of butchery?

Hymn sung by the massed bierbaesse of the Concord Club on the approach of Col. Jacobus Hook, K. T.:

Cheers, Jake, cheers! No more of pedal sorrow! Come across with cheers, Jake, and help us on our way! Send us ’round a wagonload, and let ’em come tomorrow. We ain’t got no cheers, Jake, to set upon today!

The estimable Democratic Telegram, in its current issue, says that “powerful and influential” persons are beseeching the super-Mahon to run for the Senate, and praises the Hon. Walter I. Dawkins as a “painstaking, learned and able lawyer.” In nddition, it sneers at the Hon. William H. Anderson, predicts that the Republicans and Bull Moosers will never lose again, says a good word for Zionism and prints a crude woodout of E. H. Sothern in mistake for one of Walker Whiteside. I have seen worse numbers of this alert journal, but I have also seen better.--Adv.

How prohibition works in Georgia, as described by a traveling Baltimorean--a gentleman, by the way, with no interest, direct or indirect, in the liquor business:

Although Georgia is supposed to have prohibition, there are over 200 saloons in Atlanta. All around one sees such signs as these: “Moerlein’s Near-Beer,” “Hanck’s Near-Bock-Beer.” The city charges a license of $500 for such near-beer joints. In addition they pay a $500 State license and $25 internal revenue tax. The revenue tax law forbids them to sell spirits. But there are 18 so-called clubs in which spirits are sold, and some of these clubs have as many as 1,500 members. The State law says that all liquor shall be kept in lockers, and that the keys shall be retained by the members, but a friend who took me to one of these clubs showed me that all of the lockers were open, and empty. Drinks are actually served from the bar. Whisky is called “imported ginger ale.” My friend belongs to three of these clubs. At one fashionable hotel they have a “club” in the basement, and it is full of “members” all day Sunday. If a guest at the hotel wants a drink, he is “elected” a member of the “club.”

Down with the kaif, and up with the blind pig! Down with vice and up with more vice! Down with Back River and up with the fishing shores!

The boomers! The boomers! Be still, my heart, be still! Oh, pass the old caffeine, my love, and let me roll a pill!

Moral platform of the plupious Towson Union-News:

To h----l with Fred Talbott!