Baltimore Evening Sun (18 June 1913): 6.

Then again, it will be instructive to see the Hon. Dashing Harry arise at his nightly banquet next winter and to hear him tell the assembled bibuli how his incomparable intellect conceived the plan of selling city stock to small investors and how his unparalleled energy put it through.

Entomological calendar in the luxurious Sun office:

Spring--The musca domestica. Summer--The vespa maculata. Autumn--The anopheles maculipennis. Winter--The blatta orientalis.

A DAILY THOUGHT. Alcohol eats the varnish off the bar, but it is good for the stomach.--Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean.

Sudden outburst of greasing in the dear old Hot Towel:

It is the Mayor’s idea and single purpose to make his administration one of the most economical and efficient the city has enjoyed in its history. * * * Those who are in a position to know something about the daily progress of municipal work are thoroughly appreciative of his energetic and persevering labors. * * * Persistently and continuously he has declined to take a rest. * * *

Sweet, sweet music after a long and mystifying rest. The stately return of the chief subject, the exquisite goose-grease motive in E flat minor:

{music}

One of the most frequent errors made by the bogus pathologists who argue for prohibition is the assumption that alcohol is inevitably a habit-forming drug. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alcohol may form a habit, and sometimes it does form a habit, but for every such time there are a hundred times when it doesn’t. That “insatiable cravisig for itself” of which all such moral “experts” discourse so solemnly is four-fifths imaginary. The average--i. e., the normal--man has a definite alcoholic limit, and when he reaches it he doesn’t want any more. The very thought of more, in fact, disgusts him. And that average man can stop the use of alcohol whenever he wants to stop it, either for a short period or for a long one, and in actual practice he does stop it now and then, and without any of the stupendous struggles pictured by the boozephobes. The inability so to stop it is evidence of a pathological state, and that pathological state is far oftener the first cause of drinking than the ultimate effect of drinking.

Of all the drugs used by man, indeed, it is probable that alcohol is the least likely to form a habit. Every man who both drinks and smokes in moderation will tell you that it is easier to stop the drinking than the smoking. And every man who uses both alcohol and coffee will tell you that it is easier to go on the water wagon than to give up his cup at breakfast. To compare alcohol to such drugs as opium and chloral is to make a comparison as inept and sophistical as that made by Dr. Humphries between the saloon and yellow fever. No one ever heard of a man who could take a dose of morphine today and another tomorrow, and then go without it for two weeks, but that very thing is done constantly by moderate users of alcohol, and what is more, it is done without any effort and without any pressing sense of something missing. Are there many coffee-souses who could do it? I doubt it. Between coffee and alcohol--at least in its milder, fermented forms–all the dangers are on the side of coffee.

I do not argue, of course, that, pint for pint, coffee is as toxic a drink as whisky, or even as wine or beer. But what I do argue is that coffee is equally a drug, that it is equally lacking in food value, and that its continued use to excess may be similarly deleterious. I have in my possession a mass of medical evidence against coffee that is fully as impressive as any brought against the use of corresponding quantities of alcohol. And I also have in my possession medical evidence of the very first authority against the familiar argument that the use of alcohol in any quantity, however small, is injurious to health. It will be a pleasure, given proper encouragement, to embalm this evidence in print, that the approaching murder of the Rum Demon may be uncontaminated by slander, and that some slight measure of truth and justice may prevail in this quack-ridden community.

Standing of the clubs in the National Tuberculosis League for week ended May 24:

Boston.......................447 Cleveland.........................320 New York..................415 Baltimore........................304 Philadelphia..............367 Chicago............................287 Pittsburgh..................337 St. Louis...........................247

The betting odds in the Franklin street poker rooms, as reported by the police:

7 to 1 that the boys put it all over the Hon. William H. Anderson at Annopolis next winter. 7 to 1 that Anderson returns the compliment in 1916.

Patent medicines produced in the United States, as reported by the Census Bureau:

Wholesale Retail Value Years. Value. (estimated). 1899 $88,791,000 $115,428,000 1904 117,436,000 152,667,000 1909 141,942,000 184,525,000 1913 (est.) 165,000,000 204,500,000

In other words, the American people are now swallowing $1,000,000 worth of curealls every 2¼ days, or $450,000 worth a day.

Col. Jacobus Hook is a man of. such suave and genial manners that it is more pleasure to pay him taxes in hard cash than it is to swear them off before the Appeal Tax Court.--Adv.

The city of Chicago, having been “cleaned up” by vice crusaders in 1910 and again last year, is now ready for another cleaning. The following headline, from the Chicago Tribune of June 15, shows how benign and permanent are the effects of vice crusades:

MAYOR ORDERS ACTION ON VICE ---- Tells Corporation Counsel To Prose- cute Property Owners And Keepers Of Dives.

Back ib 1911, if I make no mistake, the then captain-general of the local moralists was citing the success of the Chicago vice crusade as a reason for launching a similar campaign in Baltimore. And since that time a number of celebrated “experts” in the Windy City, including the redoubtable Dean Sumner, have come among us to woo our ears with the brave tale of their herculean feats against the social evil. But now it appears by the Tribune that Chicago is still full of dives, and that the business of closing them is yet to be accomplished. So much for the romantic evidence of vice crusaders.