Baltimore Evening Sun (28 August 1913): 6.

Dr. George Thomas Palmer, in the American Journal of Public Health for July (page 648):

Any city which has any considerable typhoid mortality, say more than 5 per 100,000 of population, is a sick city.

Since 1880 the annual typhoid mortality in Baltimore has run from 20 to 40. Respectfully referred to the Hon. Dashing Harry and the Hon. Sunday-School Field, LL. D.

A DAILY THOUGHT. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.–Proverbs xxxi, 6, 7.

Forward the uplift! Ahead with government by snouters and smuthounds! The Hon. Marshall Roble, by submitting tamely to the Police Board’s order against his “Salome” advertisement, has helped the benign process along. The merchants denounced by the Hon. Eugene Levering for displaying “September Morn” had more courage, and perhaps more self-respect: they refused to be bullied, even by a self-consecrated archangel. “Sentember Morn” is still on view in their shop windows, and there it will remain until they choose to take it in. No complaints are heard: decent men are not lured to lewdness by such harmless pictures.

The Police Board, of course, had no authority to order “Salome” down. It has no authority under the law to order any picture down. Its one duty, in case its moral sensibilities are outraged, is to lay the evidence before the grand jury. It is up to the grand jury, a body far less influenced by virtuosi of virtue, to proceed against offenders. There is nothing in the law giving the Police Board a right of censorship over pictures, over books, over stage-plays or over anything else. It has no right to find any private citizen guilty of anything. It is not a judicial body. Its one right and duty is to lay evidence before the grand jury.

But what is the law in these days of government by quacks and pretenders? The blood of moralists is up; they are in the saddle; the bugle sounds. The Society for the Suppression of Vice, headed by the gifted Levering, has command of a squad of policemen, and employs them on its private errands and enterprises. Women seeking to reform are pursued like mad dogs. A policeman going into court with a prisoner who has confessed finds a Police Commissioner defending that prisoner, and sees him go free. Other policemen are snouted by private detectives, browbeaten by clerical moralists, menaced by plots and threats. The Police Board runs things by administrative order, usurping the functions of the magistrates and the courts.

Let the present grand jury, if it can find space in its report, favor us with its view of this state of affairs. And if it doesn’t, you may be sure that something will be heard about the matter on the floor of the Senate of Maryland at the coming session of the Legislature.

The Bonaparte “Progressives”: the political Holy Rollers.

Dear old Anderson! In answer my clear and specific proofs that the prohibition law in Maine is being violated on a wholesale scale, he comes forward with extracts from a vague, booming, preposterous stump-speech by the Hon. W. R. Stubbs, of Kansas–the celebrated Red Stubbs, Lighthouse Stubbs, perhaps the most grotesque of all the Western rabble-rousers. Here in Maryland we have nothing quite matching Stubbs. He is a sort of combination of Anderson, Dashing Harry, Sunday-school Field and Isaac Lobe Straus, but without the cleverness of Anderson, the frankness of Harry, the pious slipperiness of Sunday-school Field or the play-acting talents of Isaac. He is Governor of Kansas–a sufficiently cruel thing to say of any man.

But enough of the Hon. Red Stubbs, the Topeka Meteor, the Wichita Boil. Let us admit his whole case: two-thirds of the area of Kansas is substantially dry. But what of it? With a population of more than 1,700,000, Kansas has but three towns of more than 25,000 population, and the largest of them, Kansas City, is directly across the Missouri river from the big city of Kanras City, Mo., and operates a highly satisfactory transpontine pipe-line. The sport of the “forward-looking” out there is to get drunk in Kansas City, Mo., and sleep it off in Kansas City, Kan. The other two sizable towns of the State are Topeka and Wichita, both full of blind-pigs. Not a year ago a liquor warehouse was raided in Wichita–wholesale, mind you. The famous Myra McHenry, Carrie Nation’s old partner, made the raid; she told me about it herself.

For the rest, most of the so-called towns of Kansas are about as large as Pikesville or Catonsville. They lie out in the cornflilds, remote, desolate, lonely. A few drummers visit them, each carrying his ammunition with him; other strangers are seldom seen. Naturally enough, it is easy to keep such godforsaken settlements dry--that is to say, on the surface. Raiding blind pigs is the chief sport and passion of the semi-civilized yokels: they all fill up on surreptitious red-eye and jump at the sound of the schoolhouse bell. But does the Hon. Mr. Anderson argue that such methods would work in large cities–specifically, in Baltimore? If so, why is it that every large city in the existing dry areas is as wet as a sponge? For example, Atlantta. For example, all the larger towns of Oklahoma and Maine.

This is the question before us: how would the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s brummagen prohibition work in Baltimore? He talks piously about self-government, the right of the people to decide the thing for themselves. But there is no self-government in his hypocritical local option bill. It allows the present wet areas to go dry, but it doesn’t allow the present dry areas to go wet. And instead of permitting the people of Baltimore to decide for themselves whether or not they want option, it asks the country folks to force it on them. In brief, it is unfair, disingenuous and dishonest, a piece of pharisaical buncombe, a shining example of pious mountebankery. Not even the Hon. Mr. Anderson, with all his talent for paralogy, would undertake to defend it as a straightforward and honorable attempt to solve a real problem. His argument for it is wholly an appeal to the emotions and blood-lust of yokels, a sinister playing upon their eternal jealousy, suspicion and hatred of the city man.

Boil your drinking water! Vote for the Hon. G. G. Altfeld, the prose Geddes! Watch Bob come back!