Baltimore Evening Sun (9 May 1913): 8.
First Padgett gave three cheers for the Board of Awards, then the Hon. Sunday-School Field gave three cheers for Padgett, and now the Board of Awards gives three cheers for Field.
THE MORAL MUNYONS.
Our world is thronged with impatient people * * * who are busy seeking short cuts to the Kingdom. Vices and weaknesses which perhaps for centuries have flourished unchecked, and whose roots extend far and wide, in countless ramifications, through the soil of human . relationships, they want plucked up and, without more ado, cast into the ocean of oblivion* * * This is the day of the social quack and faker, advertising many a nostrum and panacea, which, if taken according to direction, will revolutionize human nature and produce the Kingdom of Heaven on earth in a week’s time. * * * What the social reformer must learn is that in uplifting mankind impatience and narrowness are out of order.–The Rev. Dr. Alfred R. Hussey.
My spies bring me news that the Hot Towel’s wiskinskis have nearly finished shaking down the honorary pallbearers for the Domesday Book and are now at work upon militant moralists and the rev. clergy. The same prices prevail as for pallbearers. A moralist who desires to tell posterity what he has done for virtue may have a whole page for $100, a half page for $50 and a quarter page for $25. The “dummy” exhibited by the winskinskis shows a large portrait of Cardinal Gibbons. No doubt his Eminence will be pleased to hear that he is being used as bait.
The whole scheme is worked from the Towel office, and very artfully. First the chosen customer is called by telephone and told that a representative of the Towel wants to see him on important busines–important, that is, to him. If he makes an appointment the “representative” appears with the “dummy” aforesaid--and a lot of soft talk about “reciprocal favors.” Then comes the schedule of prices. Then come other and more pressing arguments. No guilty pallbearer escapes without a hot fight.
It will be interesting to observe what Prominent Baltimoreans fall for this guileless enterprise, and in what eloquent terms they describe their own public services. The boomers, I hear, are marching in with banners flying and a number of moralists have yielded. Each recruit is assured, not only of free elbow room to grease himself in the book, but also of the professional interest of the Towel. He will go on its white list of worthies, along with the super-Mahon, Dr. Munyon and Joe Goeller. He will take his turn in the chair.
From the Women’s Protest, the leading anti-suffrage weekly:
Anti-suffragists do not see why they should be dragged to the polls merely to cancel the suffrage vote when the same result can be obtained by suffragists keeping away.
But why should the antis be dragged to the polls? What becomes of their theory of “indirect influence”? Why not make the men do the cancelling?
The learned Archdeacon Yellott, rural dean of Belair, wraps the cloak of martyrdom around him in today’s Letter Column and retires with sad, sad words. His closing charge, hurled into my teeth as he disappears down the chute, is that I make war upon him “behind the chest protector of over-crowded columns.” With all due veneration for a ghostly man, Pish! The charge is nonsense, and the Archdeacon knows it. The Evening Sun has always given him the free run of its space, and I have offered him unlimited room in this column in case the Editor should ever tire of him. His allegation thus appears as no more than a disingenuous bid for tears. It would almost do discredit to the Hon. Sunday School Field.
The truth about the archdeacon is that he sought to pick my weapons for me--and failed. His preference was for heavy, bogus artillery. I chose a seltzer siphon. Of that choice I make no defense. I have carried on feuds in this place with many men, and some of those feuds have been full of melodrama, but certainly no sane man would expect me to be serious with the village cut- up. In such character the rev. gent. has deliberately sought to impress himself upon the plain people of this imperial Commonwealth. In such character he must do busines now. I lament the fact, but am too much a fatalist to attempt to change it.
The real trouble with the archdeacon, I daresay, is that which afflicts the majority of the anonymous gladiators of the Letter Column. That is to say, he objects to taking punishment. A master of excoriation, a virtuoso of invective, he bawls for the police the moment a drop of seltzer strikes him. The same weakness is observed in the super-Mahon, in the Hon. Sunday School Field, and in the lovely McCay McCoy. These brave sluggers seldom open their mouths without reviling the Sunpaper, but every time the Sunpaper tells the embarrassing truth about them, they yell like wild-cats and expose their awful wounds to a tear-soaked populace. So with many moralists. They are for putting all sinners to the torture, but the moment a sinner bites one of them in the leg, there is a scream that can be heard at Cape Hatteras.
My advice to Archdeacon Yellott and to all these other whoopers is that they mend their valor. It is impossible to get through a 10-round fight without being walloped now and then. I speak by the book. I myself have been badly mauled in several late encounters. My scalp is a mass of scars; my ears hang supinely; my calves are gnawed to the bone. But the thing to do is not to weep over such personal abrasions, but to call constant attention to the ghastly lesions of the other fellow. I offer the archdeacon this valuable tip in all friendliness; forgetting his delusion of persecution, he is a man of genuine worth and charm.
Questions asked of the Hon. H. L. Mencken by the Hon. Eugene W. Barnes, of Accomack, Va., in today’s Letter Column:
- Is he a Democrat?
- Is he disappointed, sour and sore?
Is he a character assassin?
Answers to the above polite entries, in their order:
- No.
- Yes.
- The prisoner refuses to answer on the ground that it would incriminate him.
Boil your drinking water! Clean up! Paint up! Watch Bob come back!