Baltimore Evening Sun (19 June 1913): 6.

My great and good friend, the Rev. Dr. Carlton D. Harris, editor of the Baltimore Southern Methodist, favors me with a picture postcard from Athens, where he is stopping for victuals and laundry, on the way to the Holy Land. The picture, an elegant chromolithograph, shows the Theatre of Bacchus, formerly a favorite resort of the Athenian bibuli and illuminati. But no more, alas, no more! The passage of a local option bill in the year 237 A. D. was followed by a vigorous campaign of enforcement, and after 473 years of continuous effort the Theatre of Bacchus went dry, even on Sundays. Today it is a parched and lugubrious ruin, with no inhabitants save the feræ naturæ of the vicinage and a few stray hoboes. So passes joy from the earth! So the volcano of virulent virtue overwhelms us all!

Dr. Harris doesn’t say when he will return from his pious pilgrimage, but I venture to hope that it will be soon, for there is work for him to do in Baltimore. Connoisseurs will remember how quickly he clawed the cancer-cure and bile-bean advertisements out of the Southern Methodist, once their presence was called to his attention. Let him come back eftsoon and exercise his art upon the estimable Sunpaper, which still gives space to the announcements of Lydia Pinkham; and upon the Evening News, which holds the local advertising agency for Peruna; and upon the moral Hot Towel, which takes them as they come, without looking at their teeth, and lately enjoyed the characteristic honor of seeing one of its first-page customers arrested for abortion.

Design for a long-handled, dip-proof collection-plate, or moral harvester, offered to the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis, wiskinski of the pious Lord’ Day Alliance, for any evidence, not palpably for trade purposes only, that Sunday orchestral concerts at the Lyric would promote the ruin of working girls:

{illustration}

Headline in the estimable Evening Sunpaper:

POLICE KILL MAD DOG.

A better term than “kill” would be “murder.” As the Maryland Antivivisection Society has amply proved, every dog has a soul. What is more, no dog ever had hydrophobia. What is yet more, the way to cure a dog that has got it is not to kill him, but to broil him in the vapor both of Bathhouse Jean, the French super-Pasteur. Such is the New Thought as applied to so-called mad dogs.

Uplift announcement in the assiduous Hot Towel:

Mayor Preston conmenced plans yesterday for the organization of a municipal bureau of complaints. * * * Just who will be in charge of the bureau of complaints * * * will be decided on later.

Why not the Hon. Paving Bob Padgett? Bob is temporarily out of a job. He is a man familiar with complaints.

Paris cablegram in the estimable New York Times:

The commission appointed to inquire into the question of doping race horses * * * has just submitted its report to the Ministry of Agriculture. The commission found * * * that certain drugs were traceable 24 hours after administration, but caffeine and theobromine might be detected 48 hours after. * * *

Respectfully referred, etc., etc., to the Hon. etc., etc., etc., etc.

{...} object to that section of the income tax bill which proposes an exemption of $500 for each child of a married taxpayer. Consider, for example, the case of two taxpayers, the one married and the other a bachelor, and each with an income of $10,000 a year. The bachelor, under the law as it stands, will pay 1½ per cent. upon all income over $4,000, or $90 a year. The married man, supposing him to have three children--the American average--will pay 1½ per cent. upon all income above $6,500, or $67.50. In other words, the Government will allow him but $22.50 a year for the trouble and expense of rearing three children.

I say that no bachelor will object to this, but the fact is, no doubt, that the great majority of bachelors will feel that it is unjust to the married men. Take a poll of the bachelors of America, and the majority of them, I dare say, would favor an exemption of $5,000 for the mere possession of a wife and of another $5,000 for each child. Not a few of them, indeed, would probably vote for the restriction of the income tax to bachelors exclusively. Married men pay enough as it is. What is worse, they are unable to swear off their taxes, for they can’t do it without the knowledge of their wives, and the possession of that damning knowledge, as every psychologist knows, is a fertile incentive to connubial blackmail.

But the income tax, at best, is a clumsy and unsatisfactory impost. Far simpler and better would be a straight tax of $1 a day upon all bachelors above the age of 30. Any bachelor above that age who can’t afford to pay such a tax is scarcely fit to live. The world would be better off if he were condemned by court-martial and shot at sunrise. According to the Census Bureau, there are now 2,385,000 bachelors above the age of 30 in the United States. A dollar-a-day tax upon them would yield $876,525,000 a year--enough to pay more than 80 per cent. of the total expenses of the Government. And they would scarcely miss the money, which is now frittered away upon uncollectible loans and discounts to married men.

The Hon. the super-Mahon to the graduates of the Polytechnic:

We are fortunate in having the best engineers possible, and whenever I find that one doesn’t measure up to the mark, I have the painful necessity of getting rid of him.

For example, Assistant City Engineer James A. Paige, dismissed because he was unsatisfactory to Paving Bob.

Watch Anderson, gents! He is hatching some fresh deviltry, some new and even worse chicanery! Don't be deceived by his oiling of the Hon. Young Cochran. Taking one day with another, one Anderson is worth a dozen Young Cochran, bar’l or no bar’l. Keep an eye on Anderson! Stop! Look! Listen!

Boil your drinking water! Observe the return of dear old Paving Bob! Mallet the fly!