Baltimore Evening Sun (25 July 1913): 6.

When Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher, Prince von Wahlstadt, stood upon London bridge in the year 1815 and swept his gaze from Westminster to St. Paul’s, his historic remark was “Was für Plunder!” (What a town to plunder!). Much the same exclamation, I daresay, would spring to the lips of a baltimoralist who stood on the heights of Haidhausen and feasted his eyes upon Munich. There, by baltimoral standards, is the modern Sodom and Gomorrah, a town entirely given over to sin, a city without a single moral man or virtuous woman. There is Babylon plus Milwaukee plus Hoboken, N . J. There is Spot Mitchell’s raised to the nth power. There is virgin soil for malignant moralists.

No form of debauchery known to the Sunday-school books goes unpracticed by the degraded Müncheners. They spend their evenings in loathsome beer-gardens, guzzling malt liquor and listening to lascivious Wiener waltzes. In their theatres they applaud such lewd, levantine dramas as “Ein Puppenheim” (by the abandoned Ibsen!), “Heimat,” “Das Konzert” and “Alma, we wohnst Du?” On Sunday nights--Sunday, mind you!--they go to hear the unspeakable, horrifying operas of Wagner and Strauss. Their printshop windows are full of shameless nudes. Their book stores offer the libidinous works of Hauptmann, Sudermann and Wedekind--for instance, such things as “Hannele” and “The Awakening of Spring,” banned by our own police. And to crown their unexampled dissoluteness, to complete the sum of their carnalities, they have public-comfort stations, so abhorrent to our superior virtue, at all street corners.

One single Sunday spent in wicked Munich would send the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis down for the count of 10, with his collection plates rolling in all directions. The Hon. William H. Anderson would sink into a swift, cyanotic coma, with Cheyne-Stokes breathing. The Hon. Young Cochran, I daresay, would blow up with a loud report. I, myself, have seen awful sights in Munich. I have seen 6,000 men, women and children crowded into the Hofbräuhaus on a Sunday night, consuming Hofbräu at the rate of 7,000 quarts an hour, the while a military band of 50 pieces played “Ach, Frühling, wie bist du so schön!” I have seen 20,000 persons in the gardens along the Isar--the Back River of Munich!--and each with a mass before him. I have seen Müncheners stop at the Franziskanerbräuausschank on their way to church on Sunday morning, and there wet their whistles with their hymn books under their arms.

Think of a town without a single militant moralist! Think of a town that proceeds toward the bottomless pit at the rate of 400,000 miles a second--and not an archangel to wave a red undershirt and yell “Halt!” Munich has never seen a vice crusader; it has never had a raid on the Hofbräuhaus; it has never heard of Dr. Donald R. Hooker. In all Munich there is not a single uplifter, social server or other such moral bichloride tablet. The clergy of the town do not let out their pulpits to Andersons for value received; all the exhorting that is done they do themselves, being honest union men. Munich has never had a Pentz. It has never been saved by a Bonaparte. Its people are wholly ignorant of the fact that one drop of nicotine, placed upon the tongue of a dog, will give the animal the fan-tods. They do not know that all beer-drinkers die of acute miliary eczema, and in two places at once, the gallows and the gutter. They have never heard that the bier-fisch produces gout, wife-beating and misprison of treason.

An anti-vivisectionist would cause as great a sensation in Munich as an honest delegate at Annapolis. The practice of medicine by old maids, Spiritualists and New Thoughters is prohibited by law, and the same persons are forbidden to interfere with the business of the police. A policeman in Munich leads a charmed life: he is responsible only to the head of the department. He is under no obligation to curry favor with self-appointed censors; he is not spied upon by imported snouters; he is never punished without a fair trial, and a chance to confront his accusers. Munich is innocent of the recall of judges, and of the initiative and referendum. In the whole town, there is not a single dictaphone.

According to the statistics compiled by the Hon. Mr. Anderson and other great baltimoralists, there should be at least 250 murders in Munich every night, and the death rate from chronic interstitial nephritis should be between 700 and 800 per 1,000 per annum. But the official reports, curiously enough, show no such figures. Despite their incredible debaucheries, the Münchenese are but slightly given to homicide. What is more, they. seldom commit arson, highway robbery or piracy on the high seas, or the “rapines” described with such eloquence by Dr. O. Edward Janney. What is still more, the death rate among them is phenomenally low--little more than one-half, in fact, of the death rate among Baltimoreans. They sin--and get away with it. They are indescribably immoral--and yet they live to be 70 or 75, and die without repenting.

Such is the modern Gomorrah, the Vesuvius of iniquity, the anti-Baltimore. It cries aloud for salvation. IT begs and shrieks for a picked corps of baltimoralists, a herd of experienced raiders, a pestilence of purifiers. Its people need an Anderson to teach them that they are rogues and vagabonds, and a Levering to guard them against temptation. They need a Lord’s Day Alliance to stir up sectarian hatreds among them and to gather up their surplus pennies. They need a Hooker to teach them “social hygiene,” a Niles to reform and mellow their system of government, a Humphries to instruct them in the moral logic, an S. S. Field to make them love virtue. They are poor benighted heathens. They are knee-deep in boiling brimstone. Let us send them missionaries.

No; Col. Jacobus Hook won’t do. I am suspicious of the colonel. I fear that he goes to Munich, not to lift up, but to drink down. I hear tell that he has been seen in the Hofbräuhaus, that he is not unheard of in the Cafe Luitpold, that he knows the taste of Pschörrbräu. I have witnesses who have seen him rating pretzels and white radishes in the Matthäserbräu at 10.30 o’clock of a Sunday morning!

Astounding editorial note in the Baltimore Trades-Unionist:

Humanity is far from perfect. How tiresome perfection would be if we met nothing else?

With all due respect, Koosh! The Hon. Young Cochran is perfect, and yet he is far from tiresome. The Hon. William H. Anderson was perfeet until very recently and yet he was universally admitted to be a racy and entertaining fellow.