Baltimore Evening Sun (9 June 1913): 8.

Battle-cry of the Rum Demonists, bloody but unbowed:

Que mon nom soit flétri, que la Terre Marie soit libre!

Since he received the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus’ historic brief, the Hon. Woodrow Wilson has been so scared and worried that he has been unable to sleep more than nine hours a day, or to eat more than four meals.

The way things are in Baltimore, it seems like the shamash is always coming around with some new tekanah. One thing happens; either we all get as fromm as bachurim or else we all go maschuka.

A DAILY THOUGHT. Every man is his own hell.–The Rev. John Alexander Dowie, D. D.

Six dollars cash for the name and address of any anti-suffragist who would rather darn a sock than make a speech.--Adv.

Dear old Williams, the Christian Science press agent, in The Evening Sun Letter Column the other day.

To claim that because one is an anti-vivisectionist he must be a Christian Scientist is comparatively the same as saying that * * * one who does not believe in the use of medicines is necessarily a Christian Scientist. One who denounces so many as unreliable should exercise a little more care in his own statements. * * *

Next to the Hon. William H. Anderson, the Hon. Mr. Williams is the most suave, the most genial, the most skillful, of all the local snatchers and smouchers of free reading matter. Here, for example, he boldly gobbles a quarter of a column of space on the editorial page, worth 25 cents a line--and with no reason or color of excuse whatever. Have I ever argued, even hinted, that an anti-vivisectionist “must be a Christian Scientist”? Of course I have not. Neither has anyone else to my knowledge, at home or abroad, dead or alive. All I have ever said about anti-vivisectionists, or that anyone else has ever said about them, may be redueed to the following sparse and parliamentary terms:

1. That the great majority of them, male and female, are deliberate, habitual and unconscionable liars.
2. That all their alleged pity for the guinea pig is really a hot yearning to knock out the doctor.
3. That they want to knock out the doctor because they have “something just as good” to sell.

This is the case against the anti-vivisectionists, and it has nothing whatever to do with the precise nature of the peruna they cry up and have on tap. A good many of them, I have no doubt, are Christian Scientists, for Christian Science is still in considerable favor among the ignoranti, and the first impulse of a counter-jumper who begins to fancy that he knows more about medicine than Dr. Welch is to open a healing joint, and so rake in the easy money of the bilious and believing. But this trade is by no means monopolized by such frank disciples of the polyandrous Mrs. Eddy. The truth is that Christian Science now has to meet the competition of a dozen other quack-healing cults, and that not a few of them promise to beat it out in future.

To one or another of these quack cults practically all anti-vivisectionists belong. Some, for example, are osteopaths, and hold that all human diseases are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue–a theory supported by the most casual examination of their own heads. Others are chiropractors, and believe that all diseases are caused by nerves getting squeezed between adjacent vertebræ--a theory which pictures the backbone as a sort of accordion or concertina. Yet others are Emmanuel Movers, and hold that “as a man thinks, so he is”--a theory beautifully proved by the case of the man who thought that he was sitting on a keg of Bismarck herring, whereas its real content was nitroglycerin. And yet others are vegetarians, or hydrotherapists, or mechano-therapists, or neuropaths, or members of some other outlandish and imbecile lodge of super-Oslers.

Naturally enough, the persons who run such lodges are bitterly opposed to scientific medicine, for the chief thing that scientific medicine teaches is that there is no such royal road to health as that they so confidently light and buoy. The way it tackles a disease is by patient experiment and the way is apt to be different for each new disease. Against this laborious patience all the perunists raise a yell. What they promise the sucker is that they will teach him how to combat all diseases, of whatever sort, by means of one simple trick. Maybe that trick is physical--for example, the so-called “Bohemian thrust” of the chiropractors. More likely it is mental--for example, reading a book. But whatever its exact nature, its essence lies in its love!y simplicity. It solves all problems at one stroke. It is comprehensible to the meanest understanding. It stands in sharp contrast in the infinite complexity of scientific medicine.

This explains, among other things, the great success of Mother Eddy’s noble invention. Christian Science makes no demand whatever upon the intelligence, and little more upon the patience. It takes at least four years of very hard study to master even the rudiments of medicine, but any person who can read large print can master the whole of Christian Science in four days. The thing in not only possible: it has been done over and over again. A Christian Scientist who has given so much as two or three weeks to the study of the art is not only ready to heal himself of any disease known to man, from stomatitis to hydrophobia, but he is also ready to heal others, and to collect in advance for the healing, and to evade the laws by calling his buncombe a “religion” and his graft a “present.” No wonder the business is popular, and no wonder its practitioners are very bitter against those who educate and warn the public against it, and seek to blow it up!

There may be, of course, anti-vivisectionists who have no such ax to grind. I have no doubt that a few such innocents exist. But they are not often heard from. They are not the baying and bellowing Iokanaans of the anti-vivisection societies. All the chief whoopers are persons with something to sell--Christian Science “healers,” osteopaths, patent medicine manufacturers or other gladiators of medical “freedom.” Add a few sentimental fat women and half a dozen old maids, male and female, and you have the typical anti-vivisection society. Fools inflamed by liars. The ignorant leading the more ignorant by the nose. A kaffeeklatsch of the godforsaken, with music by Offenbach.

Say what you will, gents, Sunday-school superintending ain’t scarcely what it used to be no more.