Baltimore Evening Sun (29 July 1913): 6.

From a ribald editorial in the current issue of The Masses:

A congregation of New Thought people (i. e., people to whom thought is new). * * *

Can it be that the editor of The Masses lacks all respect for the New Thought and the New Thoughters, with their great gifts of oatoopathy and penalogy, psychical research and the recall of judges, crystal-gazing and the single-tax, the vice crusade and the initiative and referendum? Can it be that he is a low, vulgar mocker of “forward-looking” men? Koosh, brother! Choke your sneers! Who are you, O miserable worm, to make war upon the archangels!

A DAILY THOUGHT. I wish men to be free, as much from mobs as from kings.—Lord Byron.

Astounding remarks credited to Miss Mary Cathcart, probation officer of the Juvenile Court:

The behavior and morals of girls is not a question of electric lights. It is a question of mothers. If girls are properly trained in their homes, that, combined with their natural instincts, affords protection. Without that, no number of electric lights will help them. I positivoly do not believe that the natural beauty of the parks or the pleasure of innocent people should be sacrificed to the cry for police-made morals.

In justice to Miss Cathcart, let me say right away that the reporter who wrote this alleged interview in The Evening Sun is a man wholly without morals and that he was probably far gone in liquor when he wrote it. All newspaper reporters regard vice crusaders as busybodies and asses, and therefore all newspaper reporters are scoundrels. But even so, Miss Cathcart must have actually expressed some such views. She must have said something, however meagre, however discreet, to have started so amazing a skyrocket of immorality from that drink-maddened reportorial brain. And so she stands convicted before a moral public of flouting the most sacred discoveries and doctrines of our village Savonarolas and Torquemadas, and of committing a grave and wanton offense against the New Thought in morality.

Let her recant, repent and have a care. Let her rid herself of her reactionary and dangerous delusions. The idea that private morality is a private matter has been knocked out and blown to pieces by sagacious and holy men, the saviors of our carnal cilvilization. We enlightened ones know better. We know that the working girl is a sinful and sinister creature, that she will turn to vice the moment the temptation offers. We know that the only way to save her is to put her in charge of the police. They must observe and track her on the streets; they must decide what dances she may dance, and when, and where; they must regulate her raiment, external and esoteric; they must keep a searchlight upon her while she receives her beau; they must drive her back into the town when she seeks the green trees on Sunday; they must inspect and regulate her boarding house, with occasional prophylactic raids; they must hold a club over her day and night.

Miss Cathcart speaks of “the pleasure of innocent people.” Who and where are these innocent people? They have no material existence. Nobody is innocent any more: innocence is dead. Of all forms of recreation possible to poor folks, 95 per cent. are now indecent and the rest are downright felonious. It is the clear duty of every moral citizen to help put down these rogueries. The police, burdened with their new duties, need help. Some of them, indeed, need watching themselves. Who will join a moral patrol? Who will give over his Sundays to collecting evidence at Back River and his week-day evenings to snouting in the parks? Who will arm himself with a pocket flashlight and go forth to take the working girl in her debaucheries? Who will dedicate himself to the New Morality?

My learned friend, the Rev. Dr. Charlton D. Harris, takes due credit in the current Baltimore Southern Methodist for his late adoption of a virtuous life. Snouting around in my genial, moral way, I caught the doctor in the act of printing quack advertisements in his able journal, and so bawled him, as they say in the kaifs. In 10 minutes by the clock he had ordered them out. A swift and honest repentance, and one to be praised by all forward-looking men. Would that the Hon. William H. Anderson were as easy to lead up to grace! Would that his shell of sin were as deficient in cale and manganese! My one hope and ambition is to save the Hon. Mr. Anderson. I shall live in sorrow until I have made him weep in public for his historic tempting of the clergy.

The Rev. Dr. Harris does me the honor of expressing a certain concern about my own evil courses. In brief, he offers to help me mend my ways. With the utmost gratitude and respect, I venture to withdraw in favor of the gentleman from Illinois. If the doctor will join me in wrestling with the Hon. Mr. Anderson, then I promise to submit myself unreservedly to his exhortations afterward. Here modesty speaks. It would make me blush to allow the doctor to waste his effort upon my own puny offendings while so vast a giant of erring as the Hon. Mr. Anderson still went at large, leading holy men into dubious paths, and flinging his loud, defiant guffaw at the firmament of heaven.

The benefits and usufructs of prohibition in Oklahoma, as described by a correspondent of the New York Times:

The janitors and school teachers in the public schools of Oklahoma City, the largest city in the state, have not yet received their May salaries, and before they can collect them they must sue and obtain judgment against the Board of Education. The expense of the suits must be borne by the teachers out of their meagre salaries. * * * If the holders of State warrants and the school teachers of Oklahoma City could collect the face value of their claims they would consider themselves lucky.

This recalls the fact that in a number of the dry counties of Maryland the public schools have had to close for lack of funds. In the wet counties the schools have all run full time.

From “Germany and the Germans,” by Price Collier, page 219:

The German mind has no sympathy with hypocricy. They may be brutal in their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, byt there are no moral prigs. In * * * America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is a rich man. * * *

Give ’em more raids, Doc! Raids are what they want.—Adv.