Baltimore Evening Sun (7 May 1913): 6.

That deep antagonism to beauty which so markedly characterizes the moral mind is once again visible in the hideous helmets forced upon a reluctant gendarmie by the Police Board. Ethics and æsthetics have been sworn foes since the dawn of human history. Find me a man obsessed by moral ideas, and I will show you a man with no more sense of joy and beauty than a tadpole. The ancient pillar saints, who reached the highest point of personal virtue ever attained by mere man, wore whiskers dripping to their knees and washed but once a century. The cathedral builders, judged by the standards of our current Puritanism, were highly immoral men. Many of them were winebibbers, and others used profanity. Not until the revival of chemical purity in the middle nineteenth century was the galvanized-iron church invented. The same period saw the invention of the bustle, the crayon portrait, the upright piano, marble-top furniture and the detachable cuff.

Half a dozen years ago, when the Police Board was frankly immoral, and refused to jug delicatessen dealers for selling matzoth on Sunday, the police were given very graceful helmets, and had neat caps for summerwear. But the present board, being highly moral, pronounces a curse upon all such Babylonish lecheries and snares of the devil. The helmet it provides for the cops is so ugly that even the cops are ashamed of it. It exposes them to public mocking and contempt. It puts them to wholly unnecessary pain and disgrace. No more appalling headpiece has ever held the human skull in its loathsome embrace. The delight of moralists, it is æsthetically unspeakable.

Curiously enough, this Puritan hatred of beauty does not, in point of fact, promote morality. In the beautiful cathedrals of Europe it is unheard of for the clergy and choir singers to fight each other with the holy vessels, whereas in the galvanized-iron chapels of our own moral land the thing is so common that it scarcely provokes comment. By the same token it is highly improbable that the torture of the helmet, the mortification of the spirit by ugliness, will make our cops more virtuous. On the contrary, it is very likely that they will actually become less virtuous--that the insult to their self-respect will corrupt and corrode their morals.

Policeman, as a rule, are neat and cleanly men, with a laudable pride in their personal appearance. They like to be admired. And the more they are admired, the more diligently they perform their public duties. To rob them of that salubrious admiration, to make them public butts and scarecrows, must inevitably have the effect of making them careless and callous. And a cop who has grown careless is a cop ripe for any deviltry. The new helmets, unless I am no psychologist, will make for graft. They are moral in intent, but wholly pernicious in effect.

What ails good Archdeacon Yellott, of Belair? Can it be that his messianic delusion is now complicated by a delusion of persecution? (The Savonarola complex!) Is he preparing to pose as a martyr moral and ecclesiastical, as the super-Mahon is a martyr moral and political? If not, then why does he issue such dark hints in today’s Letter Column about conspiracies to throttle him, to can him, to shut off the hot geyser of his valiant verbosity?

Let the rev. gent. abate his fears and have done with his defiances. The Evening Sun has printed two or three acres of his bucolic wheezes in the past, and is perfectly willing, I am officially informed, to print another acre or so in future--always supposing that the stuff is delivered in installments which meet his own conditions as to length, and that it contains no obscenity. And, if, by any accident, it is ever crowded out, then I offer the archdeacon the hospitality of this column. It would distress me exceedingly to see so beautiful an archangel with no stump to flap his wings from.

But to enter upon a formal and endless debate with him would be difficult, for in the first place I have many other fish to fry. And in the second place I do not dispute his general allegations. When he argues that I have attacked the militant moralists with great uproar and violence, he achieves nothing better than a platitude. The thing is obvious: it goes without saying. And when he argues that they haven’t deserved it, he gets no further than an expression of his personal opinion. I am not interested in his personal opinion, nor even in his ex cathedra opinion. I would much rather hear the views of the moralists--and more than once, in the sad past, I have!

Meanwhile, the rev. gent. tries to to prove me a caitiff by showing that a Free Lance article printed on September 3, 1912, bore only my initials and not my full tedescan name. With all due respect, Pish! The use of initials on that day was due to a typographical emergency, and deceived no one. I was mentioned by name in the Letter Column no fewer than four times. I had been operating this moral abattoir for more than a year. The rev. gent’s original charge was that “the Free Lance column was nameless during the first part of its existence.” A gratuitous and heartless mendacity, a fib immoral and sacerdotal.

Dr. Goldsborough’s decision to molest the Penitentiary Board no further is a testimonial to his moderation, for it must be plain that he is thoroughly opposed to the principles it defends, and no doubt it has required some effort for him to stay his hand. But it is highly improbable that any permanent good would have been accomplished by a public and scandalous trial of the Hon. Messrs Furst, Stone, Crane and their associates. These men kept their heads in the face of the extravagant attacks of the Penal Commission and have shown a sincere desire to correct all genuine defects in administration. To put them on public trial would be only to convert an honest and honorable difference of opinion into an unseemly and unprofitable wrangle. Let it be hoped that Dr. Goldsborough, when he chooses a professional penologist to advise them, will be led to a man of sense and not to a mere darling of moralists and ear-bumper at Chautauquas.

The Hot Towel expects every Prominent Baltimorean to do his duty. Come across with. your $100 blls, gents, and praise yourselves as you please. Later on you will take your turns in the vaseline machine. The Towel never forgets a friend.--Adv.

Boil your drinking water! Help the boozehounds save Besotted Baltimore! Watch Padgett come back! Weep with McCay McCoy!

Col. Jacobus Hook emerges from the paving scandal with not a cigar broken.--Adv.