Baltimore Evening Sun (2 August 1913): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

Route recommended to Col. Jacobus Hook: from the Bayrischer Hof to the Hoftheaterkaif, to the Holfbräuhaus, to the Löwenbräuhaus, to the Pschorrbräuhauputausschank, to the Franziskanerbräuausschank, to the Odéonkaif, to the Caffy Luitpold, to the Simplicissimus, to the Mathäserbräukeller, to the Hapsburgerhof, to the place of beginning.

THE TEMPTER

[Lines addressed to the Hon. William H. Anderson by one of the tempted parsons.]

Get thee behind me, Satan!
Egad, I’m tempted sore
To break away from preaching
And join your motley corps;
My saintly palms are itching,
Right gladly would I yield,
And hie me to Columbus
And pleasures far afield.

But at the crucial moment
Stern conscience bids me stay;
And lo! I’m stuck in Baltimore
When conscience bars the way!
Instead, I halt and hesitate,
And beat about the bush;
Get thee behind me, Satan!
Get thee behind!—and push!

Scriptural texts bearing upon the Hon. William H. Anderson’s celebrated crime:

Respectfully referred to the Hon. Charles M. Levister, matador of the New Thought in exegesis.

Mayor Gaynor of New York to the Rov. Dr. Joseph Keevil, clerical snouter employed by the Sunday Observance Society of Kings county (a sort of local Lord’s Day Alliance) to break up Sunday baseball:

Some think that what you are doing on Sunday–namely, trudging all over the city and watching your neighbors and receiving wages therefor, is work” within the meaning of our Sunday law, and also of the Divine commandment which says, “Thou shalt not do any kind of work” on the Sabbath. Your case, to say the least, may be as debatable as the case of the games on Sunday in the fields, which you are objecting to. If these games are of doubtful legality, is not that also the best that can be said of the work which you are doing on Sunday for pay? If a private citizen hires out to other private citizens to go about as a sort of catchpoll on Sunday to watch whether his neighbors play ball and stop them, is he not working?

Respectfully referred to the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis, wiskinski of the Lord’s Day Alliance. On what theory does Dr. Davis hold that spying at Back River on Sunday is a “work of necessity or charity,” within the meaning of the act of 1723? Or collecting money for that enterprise in the Sunday-schools? The so-called Lord’s Day Alliance is largely a sporting organization: it provides the same sort of excitement for old maids, male and female, that healthy boys get out of chasing cats. Its work is no more “necessary” than the work of the Baltimore Baseball Club. And it is wholly and absolutely devoid of “charity.”

The time is not far distant when it will be in order for some public authority to undertake a calm and judicial investigation of all the “moral” organizations which now flourish so amazingly among us. These organizations take on a sort of quasi-official character, but they are not responsible to the people. No account of their inner workings is ever published. No one knows just how the power and influence they acquire are exercised. Here would seem to be work for an alert grand jury. What has the law to say, for example, about the undisguised lobbying of the Anti-Saloon League and its frank efforts to bully and browbeat public officials? What of the “moral squad” lent to the Society for the Suppression of Vice by the Police Board--a squad paid by the taxpayers of Baltimore, but used for private purposes by private persons?

Astounding remarks of the Hon. Lewis L. Fawcett, J., of the Brooklyn bench:

They use the lash on first-degree burglars and highwaymen [in England], and after those prisoners have received 60 lashes and have had salt rubbed into the wounds they either change their minds about engaging in further crimes or leave the country. I have come to the conclusion that the way to stamp out the bad man is to meet brutality with brutality.

What! Has Judge Fawcett never heard of the new science of penalogy? Is he not hep to the great discoveries of the uplift? Does he disdain “experts”?

Article respectfully recommended to the kaffeeklatch moralists of the Maryland Suffrage News:

“Women and Morality,” by A Mother, in the English Review for July.

The New Morality, that sweetest offshoot of the New Thought, has two branches. On the one hand, it teaches that all the men hitherto regarded as scoundrels are really pathetic victims of cruelty and persecution, and on the other hand, it teaches that all the men hitherto regarded as decent and respectable are really villains and voluptuaries. For the negro rapist it has only tears: he is to be freed from his fetters, stripped of his stripes and protected against the harsh, insulting discipline of the Weylers and Lankfords. For the workingman who drinks a bottle of beer on Sunday it has a big stick: he is to be raided by the police, dragged off to jail and sentenced to 30 days in Sunday-school. The rapist, once a rogue, is now virtuous, the workingman, once virtuous, is now a rogue. Such is the New Morality, that affecting mush.

Mayor Brand Whitlock of Toledo, on the donkeyish outburst against the harmless picture, “September Morn”:

All this hysteria came from the fact that a policeman in Chicago, who thought it his duty to censor morals, saw something evil in it. * * * When the law was appealed to, the policeman was not upheld. * * * Policemen are not authorized to act as moral censors or art critics. In this case, as in all similar cases, the evil, the nastiness, was not in the picture; it was in the policeman’s mind, and by his action he seems to have succeeded in spreading that nastiness all over the country. * * * Obscenity and its kindred vices are not objective; they are subjective. They are not in an object; they are in the mind of the beholder.

Respectfully referred to our own busy smuthounds and volunteer guardians of the public virtue.