Baltimore Evening Sun (15 August 1913): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

Optimistic note in the estimable Sunpaper:

There ought to be a sufficient number of ambitious young men in the city, young men who see the trend of present-day politics and the drift toward democracy of the Woodrow Wilson type, to form a fighting ticket.

At once the first volunteer steps up--the Hon. Goose Grease Altfeld, K. T., LL. B. All that the Hon. D. Harry has become, that the Hon. Mr. Altfeld hopes to be. Trained in ethics in the Hot Towel office. and a pupil of good government under its sublime Author, he seeks to rehabilitate, in our decadent civilization, the glory that was Grease.

The Hon. Elizabeth G. Taylor, the estimable and persuasive suffragist, in protest against the use of her Christian name by a loutish contributor to the Letter Column:

This is the privilege I accord only to intimate friends, and these I reserve to myself the right to select.

A frank statement of sound doctrine. The use of the Christian name, without express permission and urging, is grossly insulting and wholly unjustifiable. It is a habit of the vulgar and impertinent, and in particular, of the relatives of one’s wife. Why should a man’s relatives-in-law assert and assume such an intimate privilege? Why should he submit to being called Jack or Harry by his mother-in-law, a person whose very presence in his house is a subtle and irritating criticism? Why should be let his wife’s sisters address him familiarly, as they might address a child or a house-dog? The sisters of a man’s wife, it must be plain, are always obnoxious to him. If they are younger than his wife, they hold before him a distressing picture of what his wife has ceased to be; if they are older, they taunt and threaten him with what she may become. In either case he must needs view them with bilious eyes, and in either case he must writhe under their easy familiarity.

Most men dislike being called by their Christian names, even by their wives. There was a time, indeed, when no respectable married woman dared assume the right. Mrs. Washington, as we all know, invariably addressed her husband as “General,” and the other wives of that more courtly day called their husbands “Mr. Johnson” or “Mr. Smith.” Even Mrs. Caudle, for all her contumacies, did not stoop to vulgar familiarity. The beautiful custom continued in vogue until the period of the Civil War. Since then all connubial reverence and discipline has been shattered in America. I know a married woman who actually calls her husband “Buck”! And another who calls him “Sweetie.” No man can keep his self-respect in the face of such intolerable invasions of his dignity. He may make no protest, but all the same he suffers, and as he suffers he degenerates. Thus are drunkards made, and wife-beaters, and bankrupts, and alimonists.

The Rev. F. R. Bayley, the sacerdotal politician, in the Sunpaper of this morning:

The only member of the staff of your afternoon edition contributing to its editorial page uses about half his space to assault the local option folks with coarse jokes, misrepresentations and vulgarity.

Frappe donc, Macduff, et damne soit celui qui criera le premier: “Arrête! c’est assez!” Schlag an, Rav Moskowitz, und verflucht der Schlemiel der erst jammert: “Halt! ’S’nough!”

But what has the rev. gent to say of the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s historic tempting of the friars minor? And what of the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s bold claim to heavenly inspiration? The political spellbinding of a suburban clergyman is not to be taken too seriously, but all honest men are glad to hear him on points of ethics and hagiology. Let the Rev. Dr. Bayley now enchant our ears with the orthodox doctrine on these moot questions. What does he think of the trip to Columbus? And does he accept the highly colloquial editorials in the American Issue as revelation?

Next Monday, August 19, will be the fourth anniversary of the case against ex-Sheriff George Padgett, cousin to Paving Bob, for the recovery of $10,206.63 in fees. The Courthouse, as usual, will be decorated with Japamese lanterns and a stuffed eagle, and a salute of 21 guns will be fired from the battlements. How time flies! The Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus, who filed the suit for the State, has long since retired from public life, and is now a spellbinder for the Anti-Saloon League. Of the Baltimoreans alive at that time, 42,754 have since died. More than 44,000 babies have been born in our fair city; the Hon. D. Harry has been elected Mayor, and inaugurated with affecting ceremonies; the Bulgarians have licked the Turks, and been licked by the Servians; Col. Jacobus Hook has made two trips to Munich; the Hon. Goose Grease Altfeldt has emerged from obscurity and become a public man; the Hon. Jim Van Sickle has been canned; Baltimore has acquired a moral Police Board, the first in history; the Hon. John F. Weyler has been burned at the stake and recovered from it; the world has become aware of the great gifts of the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough; the Danes and Greeks have changed Kings; the Hon. Dan Loden has got jobs for 5,678 members of the Concord Club. But George still hangs on to the money!

Passionate strophes of an advocate of kissing in the Letter Column:

Yon don’t need to go into history, Mr. Free Lance. Look around you. How many men do you know whose lives have been changed for better or for worse by that same world-old kiss?

Answer: not a darn one. I knew men whose lives have been changed for better or for worse--usually for better--by politics, Correspondence schools, rheumatism, lotteries, the stock market, burlesque shows, the works of Dr. Sylvanus Stall, the Sunpaper, automobiling and alcohol, but not one who has been visibly improved by kissing. No respectable man likes to kiss. He may do it to be polite, but he doesn’t enjoy it. Nor does he see any esoteric significance in the act. It is as bare of influence and portent as the act of sneezing, and fully as disagreeable to the man of intellect.

Further contributions to a dictionary of malignant morality:

Motto of the Hon. Goose Grease Altfeld, aspirant in the First ward:

Cast thy vaseline upon the waters!