Baltimore Evening Sun (30 May 1913): 6.

Score one for the Hon. Young Cochran. He slipped in quietly and put it over, and it wss a noble day’s work for the Anti-Saloon League. The Rum Demon awoke this morning with a faraway taste in his mouth and with extensive lacerations along his shins.

Proposed divisions in the coming suffrage parade:

Shoplifters. Baby farmers. Lady embalmers.

PROHIBITION —— Nothing is more foolish, nothing more utterly at variance with sound policy, than to enact a law which, by reason of conditions surrounding the community, is incapable of enforcement. Such instances are sometimes presented by sumptuary laws, by which the sale of intoxicating liquors is prohibited under penalties in localities where the public sentiment of the immediate community does not and will not sustain the enforcement of the law. In such cases the legislation usually is the result of agitation by the people in the country districts, who are determined to make their fellow-citizens in the city better.—Prof. William H. Taft.

The Hon. Charles M. Levister, deputy sheriff of the Anti-Saloon League, in the Letter Column the other day:

[The Hon.] Mr. Mencken’s argument against prohibition is on a par with that advanced by the opponents of every great moral movement since the world began. The Pharisees would have called Jesus a “moral perunist” had peruna been known in their day.

A pious assumption, but one not supported by the known facts. All the peruna-selling of that day was done by the Pharisees themselves. The Pharisees were vice crusaders and delighted in the woman hunt (John, viii, 3). They organized the earliest branch of the Lord’s Day Alliance known to history (Luke, xiv, 1-6). They held, like the moral bravos of the Anti-Saloon League, that they were holier than their fellow-men, and that those fellow-men should be forced to do as they ordered. As you will find in the New International Encyclopedia (Vol. xv, page 683):

He [Jesus] and His disciples mingled freely with publicans and sinners, thus violating the distinctive Pharisaic doctrine of separation from (i.e., superiority to) the “am ha’ares.” * * * They were careless about the strict observance of fasts, ablutions and the Sabbath. * * * The Sermon on the Mount was a repudiation of the Pharisaic principle that righteousness is the result of the strictness with which commandments affecting the external life are observed. The Pharisees made the religious relation one of legal compact; Jesus made it one of personal fellowship. * * * These two systems were utterly contradictory; the representatives of the one could not endure the teacher of the other. Hence the Pharisees were the most active in putting Jesus to death.

The whole ministry of Jesus was a protest against the snouting and quacksalving of these predecessors of the modern Puritan. Every time He came in contact with them it was to denounce them in unmeasured terms. He was against their vice crusades, He was against their Blue Laws, He was against their constant interference in the private affairs of persons not of their sect. Hear Him in Matthew, xxiii:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater dammation. Woe unto yoo, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land (i. e., spy, snout and raid) to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him tenfold more the child of hell than yourselves. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith. * * Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup, and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

The Pharisees never objected to Jesus on the ground that He was too good; they objected to Him on the ground that He was not good enough. They were amazed and disgusted when He refused to join in their vice crusade; they were outraged when He denounced in public their whole repertoire of moral Perunas. What did he do when He went calling on their chief on the Sabbath? They “watched Him.” Can’t you see that “investigating” committee of pious, velvet- footed brethren? Can’t you see them “getting evidence”? Can’t you imagine their solemn joy in their holy work? * * And don't you remember how Jesus turned upon them, denounced them and faced them down? Don’t you remember how He silenced and routed them?

The grandsons of these Pharisees of old are still afoot in the world. You will find them at Back River on Sundays, taking notes, getting evidence, spying upon the harmless merry-making of poor folks, carrying away salacious tales of incredible debauchery. You will find them before the Police Board demanding the aid of the policeman’s club in their holy wars. You will find them before the City Council urging the passage of new and intolerable Blue Laws. You will find them at Annapolis at every session of the Legislature brow-beating Senators and Delegates, reviling all who oppose them. They carry on, in these later days, the pure tradition of those Puritans who were scandalized by the Sermon on the Mount and were for stoning the woman taken in adultery. They are the direct descendants of the hysterical reformers who provoked Jesus at last, the most patient and kindly of men, to His one recorded outburst of unmeasured wrath and excoriation.

Honest men? In the case of many of them, yes. But foolish men, imprudent men, cruel men. The plan they advocate for making the world better is almost always a bad plan. Christians in faith, they are marked by a total lack of the one virtue which Christ put above all others, and that is Christian charity. They show none of the human kindliness of the genuine Christian, but only the bitter hatred of the sectarian. The world they dream of is one in which the chief priests of Christ will be policemen—a world in which men will not be good because goodness is in them, but because they fear the handcuffs, the patrol wagon and the jail. That is the world of their ideal—and they hope to run it. How many sane and decent men would care to live in it?

Two hundred dollars cash for the name and address of any anti-suffrage Joan of Arc who can cook a respectable rasher of ham and eggs.—Adv.

The Hon. Dan Loden went before a notary public yesterday and took oath that he has never been a Sunday-school superintendent and never hopes to be one.—Adv.