Baltimore Evening Sun (11 July 1913): 6.

A dollar apiece, payable in malt liquor or coffee, for the names and addresses of the rev. clergy who accepted the Hon. William H. Anderson’s offer of honest graft and protection. If the transaction was moral, why do they shrink? If it was to the glory of God, why are they ashamed of it?

A DAILY THOUGHT.
It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition that he may abuse it.—Oliver Cromwell.

From the revised Book of Rules of the Police Department:

1. Every boarding house is probably a bawdy house. The burden of proof is on the landlady. The more she denies it, the more she is to be suspected. In case of doubt, summons her!
2. No woman suspected of lack of virtue has any rights under the law. She may be arrested at any time, with or without a warrant. If no charge against her can be found, it is the duty of a policeman to arrest her as a witness. All witnesses are to be locked up without bail.
3. Whenever the captain of a district and the principal vice crusader of that district issue conflicting orders, it is the duty of a policeman to obey the vice crusader.

The Hon. Asa Bird Gardiner, Jr., will probably be a far older and wiser man before ever his crusade against hospital abuses yields any visible fruit, for such things move slowly and with many halts and set-backs, but meanwhile he deserves praise for beginning it and help in carrying it on. So long ago as the year 1904 of the present or Christian era, I whooped and I yelled in print about the lack of a civilized ambulance system in Baltimore, but all to no purpose. Two or three years ago, I resumed the music and it found a faint echo, if I remember rightly, in the City Hall. But again nothing happened. May the Hon. Mr. Gardiner be luckier! His muck-rake penetrates almost virgin soil.

So far as I have been able to find out, Baltimore is the only city in Christendom, large or small, which carts the sick and injured to hospital in police patrol wagons, and under the care of policemen. I can testify, as an old police reporter, that those policemen, without exception, are sympathetic and kindly men. They try to do their best for the man who has had his leg cut off, or for the poor fellow taken with caffeine-poisoning or with jim-jams. But their medical education, unfortunately enough, is scarcely more extensive than that of the average Christian Scientist or osteopath. In the difficult department of diagnosis, often so baffling to the best physicians, they are prone to err. And the fact that their erring is honest is of small comfort to the man whose uremic convulsions are mistaken for liquorish ribaldry, or to his surviving heirs and assigns. Nor is the necessary crudity of their surgery easily forgiven by the citizen who bleeds to death under their hands.

It is, indeed, an outrageous thing to expect policemen to undertake such highly perplexing and technical labors. Their proper business is enough to occupy the whole of their time and attention. They must keep strict watch, under the present moral regulations, upon all boarding and lodging houses, and make regular searches of kaifs and hotels. They are expected to inquire into the bona fides of all ostensibly married couples, examining marriage certificates and hearing witnesses. They are held personally responsible for the private morals of all boarders, paired or a capella, and before long, no doubt, that responsibility will be extended to the private morals of all householders. And whatever leisure is left them, after the discharge of these appetizing duties, they must devote to spying on one another.

Certainly, it is unfair, in view of all this, to expect them, in addition, to practice major surgery in moving vehicles, clad in stiff, heavy uniforms, and with no time for any aseptic preparation save spitting on their hands. It is unfair to the cops and painful to their patients. Better, by far, to have ambulances in charge of young doctors newly hatched, or even of medical students. The medical student may have his faults, but toward the end of his fourth year he begins to distinguish between a vein and an artery with considerable accuracy, and out of that talent arises an intelligent prowess against hemorrhage. All the poor cop can do is to drive fast and pay for a new uniform. He means well, but he lacks science.

So let the Hon. Mr. Gardiner go on, paying attention to the ambulance system as well as to evils and abuses within the hospitals. In both fields, I daresay, he will find much to entertain him. Some of the hospitals of Baltimore are intolerably primitive and inefficient, and in the best of them, no doubt, there is room for improvement. Like all autonomous institutions they tend to assume a lordly air toward the public. What they need is an occasional shaking up, a salubrious letting in of light. They ought to be inspected regularly by some competent and unreachable public authority, and so kept up to the mark. Such a public authority being unimaginable under a democracy, the duty of ventilation devolves upon private citizens, whose inevitable reward, of course, is execration.

ANOTHER DAILY THOUGHT.
I don’t believe in capital punishment, Hinnissy, but ’twill never be abolished while th’ people injie it so much.–Mr. Dooley.

It will be interesting, when the Domesday Book comes out at last, to see what prominent Baltimoreans have given up $100 a head for space in it. And it will be interesting, when the train pulls out for Columbus, to see what pious dervishes are in the Anti-Saloon League’s herd. It all comes out in the wash!

Col. Jacobus Hook broke all records yesterday by giving away 1,786 cigars in 10 hours. He achieved this singular feat by using both hands, two slot machines and the parcel post.

Solemn warning to the Hon. William H. Anderson: Beware of the Hon. Ed Hirsch! That meeting of kaif-keepers is a mere blind, a subterfuge. Behind it there is trickery. Behind it there is deviltry. Pas’ auf!

Boil your drinking water! Sign the new Harry petition! Give us Billy Sunday! Swat the fly!

Billy Sunday is the man we need! In Akron, Ohio, he brought the whole City Council to the mourners’ bench; in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., he converted two newspaper reporters, 27 bartenders and the sheriff. Let him come to Baltimore and try his magic on the Hon. William H. Anderson.