Baltimore Evening Sun (27 May 1913): 6.

Proud boast of the Hon. Sunday-School Field, LL. D.:

I am still holding the same position in the church that I have held for many years, and the attendance upon the Sunday-school during May, 1913, has averaged 49 per Sunday more than during May, 1912.

Advice to all other Sunday schools: Throw out your bank cahsiers and put ijn members of the Royal Family. Most of them, true enough, are already hard at it–but the Hon. Frank Kelly, I believe, is still disengaged.

The Hon. William H. Anderson, shamash of the Anti-Saloon League, in today’s Letter Column:

According to the estimates of Edward Bunnell Phelps * * * alcohol carries off every year 65,897 adults [in the United States]. These figures are as well established as figures of this sort of thing can be established. Many estimates are larger. These are conservative. * * *

More pious evidence by Old Dr. Bunk. If these figures are so “well established,” how is it that the statisticians of the Census Bureau have never heard of them? According to the latest report of the Census Bureau, the death rate from alcoholism in the United States to 5.2 per 100,000 of population per annum. Assuming the present population to be 95,000,000, this means that 4,940 Americans will die of drink this year, or just 7½ per cent. of 65,897. And what will be the relation of this booze rate to the general death rate? According to the same report, the total deaths in the United States are 1,542.6 per 100,000 of population per annum. Divide 1,542.6 by 5.2 and you get 288. That is to say, 1 American out of every 288 is killed by drink.

This is more than I estimated, and so I apologize to the Hon. Mr. Anderson. But is the number large enough to cause alarm? I think not. Just 4 times as many Americans are killed each year by influenza, and 7 times as many by bronchitis, and 15 times as many by cancer, and 20 times as many by violence, and 28 times as many by tuberculosis. Even such comparatively rare and unregarded diseases as rheumatism, meningitis and measles are more deadly. In the whole official repertory of causes of death, indeed, there are but two less deadly than alcoholism. One is malaria and the other is smallpox--and both were worse than alcoholism until a few years ago.

The Hon. Mr. Anderson’s facts and statistics, despite the general virtue of the man, are seldom of a character to inspire confidence. Last Saturday, for example, he was arguing in the Letter Column that Maine’s long eminence in statecraft, as revealed by the rise of such men as Reed, Hale, Frye, Dingley and Blaine, has been due to the fact that “during the most of these years the liquor question has not been an issue in politics.” Is this true? Of course it is not. The fact is that prohibition has been the leading issue in Maine politics ever since the passage of the first prohibitory law, in 1851. In 1856, after five years of agitation, that law was repealed. In 1858 it was re-enacted. In 1884, after a campaign extending over at least 16 years, it was made a part of the State Constitution. And ever since then the proposal to take it out again has been the leading issue in Maine politics. There is, indeed, no State in the Union in which liquor has been a more constant issue, or in which the fight over it has done more to corrupt politics.

Nor is there any merit in the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s argument that, even under license, blind pigs still exist. They exist, of course, but they do not flourish. It is under prohibition that they spring up as copiously as weeds. Putting all brummagem pieties aside, I would rather live in a city with 1,000 saloons and 100 blind pigs than in a city with no saloons and 1,500 blind pigs. And so would most other sane men, wet or dry. I do not defend the saloon: it is a very imperfect institution, and has much to answer for. But it is certainly better than the blind pig, just as segregation is better than the woman hunt.

If prohibition were approved by 95 per cent. of our people, it would actually prohibit. In certain small and isolated communities, where sentiment in favor of it is practically unanimous, it works very well. But no such majority is imaginable in Baltimore. If it is ever carried here, it will be by a majority of no more than 55 or 60 per cent.–and the minority will at once proceed to evade and nullify it. This is what has happened in Maine, where the last majority for it was one of but 758 votes. There is not a single dry town in Maine today, and there never has been. And by town, I mean any place of more than 5,000 population.

It is easy enough for the Hon. Mr. Anderson to argue that the remote prairie towns of Kansas are dry, or that Kansas City, Kansas, directly across the river from Kansas City, Missouri, is dry. But will he say that Savannah is dry? Or Atlanta? Or Charlotte, N. C.? Or Portland, Maine? Or Bangor? Or Lewiston? I think not. Nor will he argue, I believe, that even the Webb law will make them dry. No law, however drastic, is ever enforceable so long as 49 per cent. of the people are against it. And a great many more than 49 per cent. of the people are against actual prohibition, even in Maine.

Effects of the melodramatic “quarantine” of disorderly houses in Philadelphia, as reported by the Hon. Frank Garberine, white slave agent of the Department of Justice:

The only people who have profited by the quarantine have been the hotels, and I mean all hotels--first, second and third class. Well meaning people have gone into the Tenderloin and offered these girls work--work in somebody’s kitchen from sunrise to sunset! These girls will not take such positions. They have been earning from $20 to $60 weekly. They are not fitted to work in factories. Store managers throw up their hands in astonishment when it comes to employing girls with shady pasts.

According to the Living Church of May 24, Mr. Garberine further reports that 900 women, formerly resident in the Tenderloin, are now walking the streets in Philadelphia, or working the cafes, or living in disorderly houses in West and South Philadelphia. He is of the opinion that frank segregation, regulated by law, is the only practicable method of dealing with vice. In this view he is supported by four-fifths of all the Federal white slave agents throughout the United States. But the “experts” of the Sunday-schools and Chautauquas are against him. All the pious old maids, of both sexes, think he is a naughty man.

Col. Jacobus Hook wishes it to be bruited about quietly that he is not a Sunday-school superintendent and never has been.--Adv.

One million dollars reward for any evidence, not palpably satirical, that the anti-suffragists are really shrinking home-bodies.