Baltimore Evening Sun (2 July 1913): 6.

All that we need in Baltimore to make the whole population as uncompromisingly virtuous as Dr. Goldsborough, Dr. Donald R. Hooker, the Hon. Young Cochran and the Hon. Eugene Levering is a six-week orgy of remorse and repentance under the auspices of the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. Why is it that no one has yet thought to bring good Bill into our midst? He is the one whooper who outwhoops all other whoopers. He is the unchallenged holder of the Richard K. Fox diamond belt for excoriating the Rum Demon. Baltimore is ripe for him. Baltimore cries for him.

From Dr. Goldsborough’s proclamation making Saturday, July 5, a legal holiday:

Public sentiment seems strongly in favor of having Saturday, July 5, 1913, declared a full legal holiday for the purpose of affording an unusual opportunity to the citizens of this State to enjoy three days of unbroken recreation.

What has come over Dr. Goldsborough? Does he seriously propose that we use Sunday, July 6, for “recreation,” that we degrade the Sabbath to the base uses of pleasure? If so, let him have a care! Let him beware lest the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis issue against him a solemn writ of excommunication, and have him barred from the Sunday-schools as one too sinful for the society of rev. superintendents!

The Hon. William H. Anderson in the current American Issue:

We fancy we hear the Free Lance saving that “that will hold them for awhile.” In our mind’s eye we can see his fat sides shaking, and that portion of his anatomy mentioned in the nursery rhymes shout old King Cole or some other nursery saint quivering like the proverbial bowl of jelly.

Rising to a question of personal privilege, I move that the word “fat” be expunged from the record and that “buxom” be substituted. And when I say “buxom,” of course, I mean it to be taken in its usual sense of “having plumpness, fresh color and strength” and not in its archaic sense of “amorous, wanton.”

The fantastic doctrine that the whole human race should give up alcohol in order to save a degenerate few from drinking themselves to death (in the United States, according to the mortality returns, one in every 288 of the population), this doctrine is now reincarnated in the proposal that the free sale of bichloride of mercury should be prohibited in order to prevent its use as an agent of suicide. The second proposition is so strikingly nonsensical that it throws an illuminating beam upon the first. Would the jailing of druggists who sell bichloride put an end to suicide? Would it even tend to make suicide decline? Of course it would not. The suicide rate is not affected in the slightest by passing fashions in technique. If all the bichloride in Baltimore were thrown into the harbor tomorrow, and the further importation of the salt were prohibited under penalty of death, the average number of suicides during the 10 years next to come would probably not vary 5 per cent. from the average number during the 10 years just past. The means would change, but the thing itself would not change. And the persons who killed themselves with firearms, or by drowning or hanging, or some other agency, would be just as dead as those who now swallow bichloride.

Wherever a person of prominence commits suicide by some hitherto uncommon means, that means immediately becomes popular, and the number of suicides who use it shows a striking increase. But there is seldom any evidence that the actual number of suicides increases, and even when such evidence seems to show itself it almost always goes to pieces on analysis. The popularity of the new agent is exactly counterbalanced by a decline in the popularity of other and older agents. The average suicide, in other words, turns to the agent that is most conveniently at hand or most vividly in mind. But the impulse to take his life must have arisen in him before ever he gave a thought to the means of accomplishing the act. The knowledge that self-destruction may be accomplished in this way or that is of no more than academic interest to the man who doesn’t want to kill himself. And the man who does want to kill himself will still find a means, even if no present example is before him. Fully a score of agents are known to all of us.

Thus it must be apparent that the strict regulation of the sale of bichloride, as is now proposed by emotional reformers, would not tend to decrease the suicide rate, for in the first place a large number of other means would still remain available, and in the second place no conceivable regulation would keep the salt from a man determined to kill himself with it. Bichlorlde of mercury is not a rare and obviously dangerous drug, like prussic acid and strychnine. On the contrary, it is a common antiseptic, like carbolic acid, and no regulation of its sale would be workable and enforceable. To interfere with its free use would be as ridiculous as to interfere with the free use of rope or razors or any other such intrinsically harmless agent of self-destruction. Such regulations are valueless and dangerous: as they are piled up in this country they tend more and more to make the law a burlesque and a nuisance.

So with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. In the first place, the enforcement of such prohibition is impossible save in the most remote and isolated communities. And in the second place, its enforcement in such communities does not convert the native hogs into gazelles; they still remain hogs. The negroes of the Georgia backwoods, deprived of gin, are now drinking a mixture of paregoric and water, and the yokels of Kansas are full of peppermint extract, bootleg coffee and Peruna. Here in Maryland the boozers of the dry sections remain faithful to booze, despite the assiduous labors of volunteer snouters and tipsters. Huge advertisements of Duffy’s Malt Whisky, Peruna and Coca-Cola are carried in most of the Maryland newspapers, including the moral Sunpaper. If there were no sale for such substitutes for bar drinks, the advertisements, you may be sure, would not appear.

From an article in the learned Sunpaper, touting the Hon. Albert C. Ritchie for the short-term Senatorship:

It was stated that * * * Mayor Preston would be willing to support him if the Mayor saw it to be impossible to win himself.

Impossible? The word is meaningless, contumacious, imbecilic! Nothing is “impossible” to one so gifted, and particularly nothing in the field of politics. The mere announcement of his consent to serve would provoke such a frenzy of enthusiasm among the vulgar that to call his election unanimous would be a grotesque and libelous understatement of the fact.