Baltimore Evening Sun (17 July 1913): 6.

Warning to the Hon. William H. Anderson: Beware of the Hon. Ed Hirsch! He has something up his sleeve! There is a horseshoe in the glove!

A DAILY THOUGHT. God grants liberty only to those who live it and are always ready to guard and defend it.--Daniel Webster.

The Hon. Charles F. Mattfeldt, president of the Board of County Commissioners, now takes his turn upon the moral chopping-block, and a select committee of archangels is at him with clubs, bladders and cobblestones. There is a poolroom, it appears, at Westport, that modern Gomorrah. The terrible sweat game is pursued at Back River. Scoundrels go swimming on the Sabbath in Rock and Bear creeks. Baseball is played shamelessly at Prospect Park. Thieves and murderers, accompanied by their wives and infants, gather in a score of pagan groves to drink rice beer. At the fishing shores there are Babylonish debaucheries, beginning with penuchle and running up the chromatic scale. For all these deviltries the learned doctor is put to the torture. They are all his fault.

With the utmost respect, go to, messieurs! The doctor is no more to blame for such doings than he is for the fact that the sewage of Baltimore runs down hill. The true blame lies, in the first place, upon the natural cussedness of man, and, in the second place, upon the extravagant snoutings and tyrannies of our Baltimore virtuosi of virtue. These virtuosi, aided by yap lawmakers, have made life in Baltimore almost unbearable for at least a quarter of our population. The inevitable consequence is that the said population departs from the city whenever it has the price, and that its presence in the county at once breaks down the meagre police force there available. On the one hand, the Legislature demands that the County Commissioners force this huge horde to obey an endless list of sumptuary and preposterous laws; on the other hand, it limits the cost of that enforcement to $50,000 a year. As well give a man $7 and ask him to buy his way into Heaven!

If we had decent Sunday laws in Baltimore, fully a half of the Baltimoreans who now rush across the county line every Sunday morning would stay within the city limits. It is not the green grass that lures them, but the chance for agreeable recreation, suitable to their needs and taste. They want amusement, not daffodils, and if they could get that amusement nearer home they would take it nearer home. For example, baseball. Certainly not less than 20,000 Baltimoreans, men and boys, go into the county every Sunday to play baseball or to watch others play it. If the city grounds were open on Sunday, more than half of them would stay in the city. And staying here, they would not be exposed to the temptations which inevitably assail them in the county.

Those temptations, it must be plain, are bound to grow up and flourish under the present system. Not only gambling and drunkenness are forbidden by our intolerable Sunday laws, but also all the lesser and decenter recreations, from baseball to fishing. Men who desire to pursue such harmless recreations on their one day of rest--in the working class, about three men out of every four--have to break the law in order to do so, and once they have broken the law in one way, it is not difficult to induce them to break it in other ways. Knowing, by bitter experience, that some of the blue laws are outrageous, they proceed to the theory that all of them are outrageous, and so the systematic breaking of them becomes a sort of laudable sport, a cynical exercise of rights denied. That revolt has evil consequences, but at bottom it is perfectly healthy. The man who regards the blue laws of Maryland with satisfaction is either one who hates his fellow-men even more than he loves his own freedom, or one so weak and puny in spirit that he is unfit for citizenship in a free democracy.

The county police, as every fair man must admit, are utterly unable to enforce these laws, even in part. They could do it, perhaps, if the violators were few in number, or if they were all collected in a small area. But the number is fully 25,000 on a fair Sunday in summer and they are spread over a territory larger than Baltimore city. On Back River alone there are more than 200 so-called fishing shores, and every other stream down there is lined with them as thickly. Whenever the police try to enforce the liquor law, for example, in the parks along Eastern avenue, they simply drive the crowd to the shores, where enforcement is wholly impossible.

But despite this plain difficulty, they are constantly under the fire of irreconcilable moralists and mountebanks. They are accused of being in league with lawbreakers, of taking graft from them, of protecting them. No wonder their difficulty develops into actual indifference. No wonder they acquire a bilious view of the pious press agents who so hysterically denounce and libel them, and of the cause represented by those press agents. They know very well that they are not going to get fair treatment, no matter how diligent their efforts, and so it is quite natural that they should give up the enterprise as a bad business, and wink tolerantly at all violations of the blue laws, including even some that they might prevent. Cops, after all, are merely human--and it is human to spite one’s enemies.

The Lord’s Day Alliance, so often in the papers, is to blame for much of the lawlessness in the county on Sundays. On the one hand, its eternal snouting drives thousands of persons out of the city on their one day of rest, and, on the other hand, it is so extravagant and reckless in its denunciations of the summer parks, regardless of their artual character, that it tempts the good ones to become bad ones. A man might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. If he is to be accused of unnameable indecencies anyhow, why not be a bit free and easy, and so get the money? And by the process I have described, it has forfeited the support of the county police, and made them its sworn enemies. Anything that it is in favor of, they are against–and with sound reason.

What is to be done? Repeal the blue laws? Imagine a Legislature of moral yokels doing it! Loosen up in the city? What! With a Police Board run by vice crusaders? No, nothing can be done. The county police must bear the assault of the moralists. Dr. Mattfeldt and his associates must reconcile themselves to an endless bombardment of misrepresentation, blind fury and fanatical abuse. Such is civilization under a moral republic.