Baltimore Evening Sun (18 April 1913): 6.

The estimable Hot Towel, after a sinister hiatus, loosed all its blubber-guns this morning in one deafening salve. The whole of its last page was given over to greasing, the principal patients being the Hon. Bob Lee, the Hon. Sonny Mahon and the Hon. the Archangel Harry. A sample strophe from the chronicle of Harry’s trip to Philadelphia in the interest of the Hon. Paving Bob Padgett:

Mayor Preston * * * kept the diners in a continual state of hilarity, amusing with his humor and delighting with his wit and ready repartee.

The same brand of humor, no doubt, with which he amazed and enchanted the gentlemen at the Hopkins banquet on Wednesday night. But to return to the Towel. Here is its affecting tribute to Sonny:

MAHON’S VIEWS ON LICENSE LAWS–Democratic Leader Strong for Square Deal.

The praise of an honorable adversary. The homage of a great Republican newspaper to a great Democratic statesman.

Who is the premier moralist of Baltimore? Three Baltimoreans out of five, I dare say, would guess either the Hon. Eugene Levering or the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, and the rest would scatter their guesses among the Hon. MM. Summerfield Baldwin, William H. Morriss, Young Cochran, William H. Anderson, Howard A. Kelly and Samuel E. Pentz. And yet a study of the actual evidence shows that not one of these gentlemen is the authentic champion. They are respectable virtuosi, true enough, but they are not pre-eminent. The real grandmaster of them all is a man seldom heard of, a man whose assiduity seems to be unaccompanied by any thirst for publicity—to wit, the Hon. Henry S. Dulaney. Mr. Dulaney is in a class all his own. He is 66 2-3 per cent. more moral than either Young Cochran or Summerfield Baldwin; he is more than twice as moral as either the Hon. Mr. Bonaparte or the Levering brothers taken together; he is fully five times as moral as the Hon. William H. Anderson. He is, in brief, the undoubted captain- general of them all, the Goliath of militant morality, the champion of champions.

But how is the relative rank of such great antagonists and excoriators of sin to be determined? Simply enough. In a few words, by studying the moral dope sheets. But what are the moral dope sheets? The lists of officers and directors of all those local organizations which devote themselves to the chase and punishment of evil-doers. Notice that I say “chase and punishment” and not merely “rescue and salvation.” The essential thing is the element of compulsion. To plead with an evil-doer is not enough; to be a militant moralist one must also use some sort of club upon him. Militant morality is militant even before it is moral.

Well, how many such organizations flourish in Baltimore? So far as I can make out there are 10 in all, as follows:

1. The Anti-Saloon League of Maryland.
2. The Lord’s Day Alliance.
3. The Maryland Society to Protect Children from Cruelty and Immorality.
4. The Board of Directors of the United Railways and Electric Company.
5. The Baltimore Reform League.
6. The Drip Coffee Chautauqua.
7. The S. P. C. A.
8. The Board of Trustees of Goucher College.
9. The Board of Directors of the Maryland Penitentiary.
10. The Society for the Suppression of Vice.

These organizations cover, between them, all known departments of militant morality. The specific objects of their individual attack are as follows:

1. The Rum Demon.
2. Recreation in all its loathsome forms.
3. Wife-beating and the growler.
4. Smoking on street cars.
5. Old-fashioned Democracy.
6. The summer parks and moving picture shows.
7. The murder of nocturnal cats.
8. Dancing and the theatre.
9. All forms of crime.

10. Kissing in the parks, the white slave trade and the police.

Such is the layout of moral endeaver. Now for the comparative industry of moral endeavorers. Here is it table showing how many organizations each endeavorer serves as either officer or director. A crossmark indicates that he so serves; a dash that he doesn’t:

{chart}

Every connoisseur, I have no doubt, will find surprises in this table. One of the most startling of them, to me at least, is that it contains but 12 names. In other words, but 12 baltimoralists may be said to be in general practice; all the rest are narrow specialists. Thus the Hon. William H. Anderson gives his whole time to the rum demon and is never heard of in other fields. And in the same way Dr. O. Edward Janney gives his whole time to the white slave trade, and Dr. W. W. Davis sticks to Back River, and the Hon. William A. House confines himself to the tobacco evil. And of the 12 who actually qualify 6 are active in but two departments and 5 in but three. Mr. Dulaney is the only one who may be said to spread himself magnificently over the whole area of moral endeavor. His pre-eminence is arresting and indubitable. He is wholly without a peer.

Many of these moral leaders, of course, belong to more organizations than the table indicates—but only as private members, not as directors and managers. I do not think it fair to count mere membership as active participation. Even when it is accompanied by liberal contributions to campaign funds it is not the same as personal effort. A man may be a depositor in 25 banks, but if he is a director in none of them it is absurd to call him a banker. In the same way it is absurd to call a man a militant moralist if he does no more than yield up his mazuma to moral wiskinskis. I myself, for example, am a constant contributor to the treasury of the Lord’s Day Alliance, but it is as a sportsman that I give up and not as a moralist.

It is curious to note how the practical efficiency of a moralist varies in direct ratio to extent of his practice and how this efficiency transfers itself to the organizations in which he is interested. Consider, for example, the Anti-Saloon League, undoubtedly the most enterprising and successful of all the local bands of moralists. Well, the batting average of the six gentlemen who make up its headquarters committee is no less than 233.33, as the following table shows:

This is a higher average than any other moral organization can show. The estimable Lord’s Day Alliance, for example, stops at 187.5, as here appeareth:

And the Society for the Suppression of Vice, for all the noise it makes, sticks at 160, thus:

Levering 100 Wylie 100 Bonaparte 200 Morriss 300 Pentz 100 ___________ Total 800 Average 160.

If the directors be added to them executives the average of the society actually sinks to 140, so:

The Reform League makes an even worse showing. Its general average is but 112.5—a sufficient explanation, perhaps, of its present innocuousness. Time was, say in 1896, when it must have run above 250. Another weak organization is the board of directors of the United Railways, which shows but 110. No doubt this explains the fact that it confines its moral enterprise to stamping out smoking on pay-as-you-enter cars and hasn’t fervor enough left to tackle the Rum Demon. But the booby prize goes to the S. P. C. A., which shows an average of but 100. In other words, not one of its directors is an officer in any other association for moral endeavor. More than once of late it has revealed lamentably its lack of such professional aid and guidance. The addition of a few experts, of the Hon. MM. Dulaney, Dorsey and Cochran, would give it a new lease on life.

The Hon. William H. Anderson, capo comico of the Anti-Saloon League, favors the pious with a lot of characteristic “statistics” in today’s Letter Column. The city of Chicago, it appears, has “twice as many blind pigs * * * in proportion to population as prohibition Maine.” Well, let us see. In the “dry” city of Bangor, with 24,803 population, there are 119 wide-open blind pigs, or 1 to every 203 of population. The population of Chicago is 2,185,283. Divide 203 into 2,185,283 and multiply by 2, and you have 21,530, which is the number of blind pigs in Chicago—according to the Hon. Mr. Anderson. I submit then figures without further comment. They testify eloquently to the general reliability of “statistics” compiled by the Anti-Saloon League.

Again, there is the hon. gent’s discovery that “Toledo made the smallest gain of any of the big cities of that State [Ohio]” between 1900 and 1910. What are the facts? The facts are that Toledo gained 27 8 per cent., whereas Cincinnati gained but 11.8 per cent. But was this, perhaps, because Cincinnati was also wet? Well, then, what of Lewiston and Portland, the only cities in dry Maine with more than 25,000 population? Portland gained but 16.8 per cent. and Lewiston but 10.5.

The truth is, of course, that the ostensible wetness or dryness of a city has little if any effect upon its rate of growth, for the good and sufficient reason that all so-called dry cities are actually very wet. If it were possible to make a large city actually dry—that is, to stamp out the sale of liquor absolutely—the chances are that it would show a decrease in growth, if only because free Americans do not like to live in a penitentiary. But the thing is fortunately impossible. All a dry law accomplishes is to hand over the business of liquor-selling to professional criminals. In brief, it increases the criminality of a city without augmenting its compensatory virtue in the slightest.

Some anonymous correspondent sends in the following Gothic quatrain by Johann Sebastian Rudolph Hugo von Gleim, with the request that it be printed “for the benefit of militant moralists and coffee millionaires”:

Die Laster stritten, wer von ihnen
Am eifrigaten gewesen sei,
Dem Hösen in der Weit zu dienen;
Den Sieg erhielt—die Huechelei!

It is a pleasure to oblige the hon. gent. and to add a translation into American:

he vice crusade, who of him
Most zealous formerly were,
The bad in the world to serve;
The victory holds—the hypocrisy.

The Hon. Mr. Gleim was an excellent poet, though a trifle mystical. Col. Jacobus Hook ain’t hardly got nothing on him scarcely.

A New York dispatch in the alert and accurate Sunpaper:

A million and a quarter quarts of whisky, stout and ginger ale arrived here from Dublin today in the steamer Wells City. It was the largest shipment of the kind that ever reached this port. The consignment weighed 1,250 tons.

Regards to the Hon. William H. Anderson. The Hon. Eugene Levering, please write.