Baltimore Evening Sun (19 July 1913): 6.

The vice crusade: an old maid armed with a broom, chasing a flock of chickens around a 10-acre lot.

A DAILY THOUGHT. Men in earnest have no time to waste in patching fig leaves for the truth.—James Russell Lowell.

The Hon. Willlam H. Anderson, despite the supernatural character which he affects, still continues to woo the vulgar with low clowning of a lamentable quality. In today’s Letter Column, for example, he prints a letter to the church boards, alleged to have been sent out before his notorious letter to the pastors, and argues therefrom that the latter letter could not have been secret and subterranean. But the fact is, of course, that the two letters did not go to the same persons--and the hon. gent. admitted it freely in the American Issue of June 29, page 2. By his own statement, there plainly printed, he knew the names of “the official members” of a majority of the churches on his list, and to these “official members,” it may be presumed, he actually sent the letter he quotes today. But in the case of other churches he didn’t know the names of the “official members,” and in the case of many that he did know they failed to respond, and so he concocted his second letter, this time appealing directly to the cupidity of the pastors, and duly had it sent out by his agents during his discreet absence from the city.

That second letter, I respectfully submit, was anything but open and aboveboard. It was not addressed to the “official members” who got the first letter--that is to say, to the men whose money was wanted--but to the pastors; and the essential thing about it was its confidential and conspirstory character. What it proposed, in brief, was that the pastors who received it should enter into secret conspiracies with the Hon. Mr. Anderson against the “official members” of their churches, to the end that the Hon. Mr. Anderson should have the benefit of a large attendance of Maryland pastors at the Columbus campmeeting, and that the pastors themselves should have the benefit of the free trip. And the Hon. Mr. Andeerson specifically proposed that each transaction should be “personal and confidential” and specifically promised that he would “protect” every pastor who succumbed--i. e., that he would take the whole blame in the event of the discovery of the plot.

It must be obvious that no such proposition was made to a pastor whose church board had already accepted the terms of the first letter. No; the boards that had received and accepted the first proposition were not in mind when the second letter was written. What the Hon. Mr. Anderson sought to accomplish by that second letter was (a) to reach the boards whose “official members” he didn’t know, and consequently hadn’t favored with his first letter, and (b) to put the screws upon those that had failed to fall for his first letter. To this end, he sought the aid of the pastors, and in order to lure them from their sacerdotal preoccupations and arouse their eager interest, he dangled his nefarious proposal before them. It was a cruel temptation to pious and penurious men. Let us all hope that the number who accepted was less than the Hon. Mr. Anderson now states.

The hon. gent.’s contention that his request for “the name of some prosperous layman, a good friend of yours, who is able to pay the expenses himself if need be”--his contention that this meant some layman who could pay his own expenses is not one that calls for rebuttal. Let us admit it. I, for one, have never denied it. What I have protested against, as a conservator of morals, is his licentious attempt upon the church boards. It may be perfectly proper, for all I know to the contrary, for a clergyman to shake down a “prosperous layman.” But it is obviously immoral for a clergyman to engage in deliberate conspiracies against the official board of his church. His relations to that board are of a fiduciary character. When he essays to bamboozle it for his own profit he plainly commits a breach of trust.

However, let it pass. Once the Hon. Mr. Anderson ceases his inept and impudent efforts to justify his offending–I shall say no more about it. He is as much entitled to his occasional fling as the rest of us. No man, day in and day out, can maintain the high standard of virtue expected of a man in his apostolic position. He must inevitably wobble a bit, and if he sometimes jumps the track completely it is no wonder. Even the Hon. Young Cochran, I daresay, has run amuck at least once in his life. I know of no human being more virtuous in aspect, but all the same, in certain cross-lights, I see a vague hint of deviltry in his eye, a faint suggestion of some half-forgotten “damn.” As for the Hon. Mr. Anderson, I believe that he is fully one-eighth human. At some time or other, back in his buried youth, he raided orchards and tied tin cans to cats.

But now, face to face with a just retribution, he seeks refuge in idle sophistries and a cataract of rhetoric. Will he end this scandalous and unprofitable discussion by submitting himself to the judgment of a fair tribunal? If, so, I stand ready to accommodate him. Let him agree to the appointment of a court of three judicious men, one representing morality, one representing himself, and the third chosen by the other two. If he is willing, I stand ready to appoint the moral member. Going further, I actually make the appoinntment. My nominee is the Hon. Eugene Levering. And I suggest the Hon. Ed Hirsch as clerk and catchpoll to the court.

From a letter from Dr. O. Edward Janney to Dr. Donald R. Hooker, dated London, June 27, and published in the current Maryland Suffrage News:

Our friends on the Continent are astonishingly timid and slow and ineffective. I do not see much progress since my visit there three years ago.

And yet we are constantly entertained with the news that the regulation of vice has been abandoned in Europe as a failure. What are the facts? The facts are that it is so little a failure that every police chief in Europe, without a single known exception, is in favor of it, and that the suppression advocated by Dr. Janney and his friends is laughed at as impossible and ridiculous. Even in London, which the vice crusaders constantly point to as a large city without disorderly houses, the strictest segregation is enforced by the police.

Boil your drinking water! Down with Old Doc Mattfeldt! Forward the vice crusade! Swat the fly!

Still waiting for the Hon. William H. Anderson’s proofs that his licentious proposal to the preachers was not secret.