Baltimore Evening Sun (4 June 1913): 6.

Fearing the jealousy of the Hon. Sunday-School Field, the Hon. Dan Loden has had his whiskers cut off at the roots. But a sofa-pillow in the Concord Club will be at once their sarcophagus and their apotheosis.–Adv.

Up to midnight last night the wiskinskis of the Hot Towel’s Domesday Book had snared 68 head of Prominent Baltimoreans, at $100 a head, and 137 at $50. The Towel is giving credit to all subscribers except boomers. Boomers must pay cash on the block or stay out of the book. The Towel has had bitter experience with them in the past. A boomer is always willing to put his name down for $100, or even for $1,000 or $10,000, but it’s a deuce of a job to squeeze $10 out of him when the showdown comes. So the Towel is taking no chances.

Part of a letter from the Rev. Charles Fiske, D. D., declining my suggestion that he state his reasons for holding that “the ultimate and complete elimination of the saloon as it now exists is a necessary [and practicable] step toward the cure of the drink evil”:

If I tried to make it a real discussion, serious and solid, I am afraid you would not bear with me long--you have never learned, like St. Paul, to “suffer fools gladly.” And the Free Lance column would be no longer Mencken’s if it became serious and solid. It would cease to contribute to the gaiety of life, and you would soon find your occupation gone. * * * As it is, I usually enjoy you; and even when I don’t you are very useful, for you give the due opportunities to grow in Christian patience and to develop new skill in the search for modes of expression in which to frame my thoughts, while yet avoiding cuss words.

Certainly a very polite declination--but how did Dr. Fiske ever get the notion that I am not serious? Alas, what a reward for 22 years of laborious and solemn effort, expository, hortatory, pedagogical! Does he think I am trying to be gay when I call an anti-vivisectionist a liar, a numskull and a public nuisance, and so run the risk of assault, action for libel and jail for disturbing the peace? Or when I provoke the bogus statisticians and malicious animal magnetism of the Hon. William H. Anderson? Or when I lay myself open to the poisoned syllogisms of a Sam Pentz or a Dr. Yellott? But let it pass. At worst, Dr. Fiske deadens the blow a bit with the following suave words:

Meanwhile, I do not marvel that you get on the rampage once in a while about the reformers. They are annoying sometimes. * * * Now and then they even get on my nerves. * * * You remember how the old verse runs:

To live with the saints in Heaven Is bliss and glory; To live with the saints on earth Is--often another story!

You do us good by showing up the little conceits and unconscious hypocrisies of the overzealous, though I do wish that you would be as keen to show the errors of the sinners as you are to point out the mistakes of the saints. Would it not be well, too, to remember that their excess of zeal is necessary to the striking of an average, and that if we would only try to hit a happy medium between the so-called extravagances of the men who are trying to do things and the laissez faire attitude of the mass of folks who do nothing, we should really advance a lot in virtue? And I am with you heart and soul in your amused impatience with the amateur social welfare workers. Sometimes they must make the angels weep. One of them addressed a meeting of workingmen the other night in the interest of the pure milk campaign, so I hear; and she told them that in her family they were very careful, even though it cost much more, always to use Walker-Gordon milk, and no other kind–“except for the servants.” How I wish you could have been there, to describe with your inimitable skill the expressive faces of the hearers! All this, however, is aside from the point--I am trying to divert your mind from that and myself. In case I have not succeeded, let me make two suggestions: (1) Read that resolution of the Episcopal convention with other words italicized: “the ultimate and complete elimination of the saloon as it now stands.” Would you not think a little better of the resolution with the emphasis put there? The saloon as at present constituted--with its organization over-commercialized, with its dependence on the big brewers, with its political entanglements, its vicious associations, its close alliance with the social evil, with a whole lot of other things that make it, not the poor man’s club, an outlet for the social instinct (which unquestionably it is in some degree), but rather a means of coaxing, persuading and stimulating the drink habit. (2) Remenber that the social service committee, in its report, exercised some self-restraint. We did not attempt to settle all the affairs of the universe, nor did we try to treat exhaustively every subject we did handle. We did not, for example, go into the merits of Mr. Anderson’s proposed anti-saloon legislation, though we were made a little weary by the assertions of those who declared their entire willingness to pass such legislation if Mr. Anderson had only shown himself more polite and gentle and tenderly considerate in controversy. What we did say was that the question would, to some extent, be taken out of local politics if in this or some other shape it were at once put before the people by referendum. We did not go into the question of bare majorities ruling in matters of public regulations of the traffic. I haven’t time, indeed, to point out all the things we did not do. We seem to have been kept reasonably busy with the things we did attempt.

Dr. Fiske closes with the suggestion that I listen to the plans of the Social Service Committee in camera, and then “just once give The Evening Sun readers a sober, serious discussion of a big problem.” But to what end? The Evening Sun readers have already heard all that I have to say about the saloon question, and some parts of it they have heard from 200 to 750 times. What they want to hear how is the view of Dr. Fiske. I must lament in all seriousness that he refuses to expound it to them.

Condemned by medical survey to foreswear and give over, at least temporarily, the principal minor vices of civilization--to wit, and to avoid misunderstanding, wine bibbing and the use of tobacco--I enjoy an excellent opportunity to see the world as the moralists see it. That is to say, I am myself a moralist for the time being, and look down upon all common sinners from the heights of a lofty and arctic asceticism. What is more, I add sundry lesser renunciations to my two main renunciations, so that my general state of virtue is almost that of the Hon. Young Cochran. These, beside rum and the Nicotiana macrophylla, are the things I eschew:

Morphine. Hasheesh. Coffee. Chloral. Tea. Coke. Chloroform. The Betel nut.

Well, then, how does the world appear from that peak of purity? What are the sensations of a man lifted to a state of angelic asepsis? Very unpleasant, believe me! And not only unpleasant, but even downright painful. I see the world through a xanthous, jaundiced veil. I would give $200 cash for a 5-cent cigar--but I wouldn’t give 5 cents to save a blind orphan from the hangman. I hope the cop on the corner falls under an automobile and has his head cut off. The neighbors’ children have chickwn pox: would that it were smallpox. Let all the ladies of the Tenderloin be chased with bloodhounds and burned at the stake! LEt all bartenders go to jail for 20 years apiece! Thirty thousand damns upon all accursed and