Baltimore Evening Sun (9 September 1913): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

My barrister was engaged yesterday in political intriguing, and so I have got no decision from him regarding my legal right to publish my sure cure for hay fever. Meanwhile, I have received a half dozen letters from members of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty, threatening me with prosecution if I do so. However, I trust my barrister. He knows every knothole in the law. He will find a way out. Sneezing is a doomed vice in Baltimore.

A DAILY THOUGHT. The mind that associates impurity with the human body is itself impure.–Jay Fox.


Some say the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte will give the grand jury an awful bawling out next Saturday, and others say that he will break down, confess and promise to sin no more.


All the experts seem to be agreed that the progressives achieved a noble killing yesterday, but as an ignorant amateur I find myself in the uncomfortable position of doubting it extremely. The organization put through its whole legislative ticket, from top to bottom, and won an overwhelming majority in the State Central Committee. Did it let McNulty go through? Well, weren’t some of its chief gladiators openly in favor of McNulty? Did it lose Padgett, Ways & Co.? Well, didn’t organization votes beat them?


McNulty is a progressive only by poetical license. He will get aboard the bandwagon whenever room is made for him. If he is elected, it will have to be by machine votes, and he will become a sound organization man again the moment he is in office. The rest of the successful progressives will be in no position to do anything. The Hon. Bob Padgett, even though he was defeated yesterday, will be far more influential in the State Central Committee than the man who defeated him.


In the legislative fights the progressives were slaughtered without mercy. Wherever their fight was extra vigorous, as in the First district, for example, their defeat was extra heaby. The Hon. D. Harry anointed the Hon. Goose Grease Altfeld with his own unguents, and shot him across like a tenpin ball. The Hon. Frank J. Callahan made a game campaign of it, but when the votes came to be counted he was nowhere. And where did any progressive do better? Where did any progressive actually win on the straight issue?


From a Hagerstown dispatch in the estimable Sunpaper of this morning:

Werntz was one of those who got out of the coup de sac in safety.

A new one, this coup de sac, but very juicy. Let it enter into immortality with Bozart.

The Baltimore Trades-Unionist of this week contains no fewer than 111 different advertisements of breweries and saloons. Regards to the Hon. William H. Anderson!

The Hon. Wiliam H. Anderson, in today’s Letter Column:

In view of the remarks, sometimes jocular and sometimes sarcastic, made by the Free Lance concerning the Anti-Saloon League’s opposition to the Hon. Blair Lee * * * it seems that some of the facts ought to be set down.

Don’t bother, dear friend: the facts are set down very neatly in this morning’s election returns. By these it appears that the Hon. Blair Lee swept Montgomery county yesterday, despite the herculean efforts of the Anti-Saloon League and the “moral element.” Every one of his hand-picked candidates, including even the bold, bad “Cy” Cummings, that man of sin, was triumphantly nominated.

Here, I believe, was a very fair test of Anti-Saloon League strength. For weeks and weeks the whole artillery of the organization had been concentrated on Montgomery. The voters were bombarded with multitudes of circulars; thousands of copies of the American Issue, each containing furious attacks on the Hon. Mr. Lee, were distributed; the suffragettes and the rowdy preachers lent a hand. And yet, for all that whooping and snorting and damning and cavorting, the hon. gent. walked away with the county! Certainly the “moral element” must have voted otherwise than it burbled!

The moral and intellectual giants of the Police Board continue to woo the public with answers and objections, chiefly metaphysical, to the late presentment of the grand jury. I extract a sonorous strophe from today’s canto:

In the third place, we are not fully convinced that the grand jury weighed evidence as we do, or that we would necessarily come to the same conclusion which it reached, even from the evidence before it.

A beautifully florid statement of an indubitable fact. The grand jury, having evidence before it of a close and confidential alliance between the Police Board and the late chief agent of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, came to the conclusion that the scandalous downfall of that agent left the Commissioners in the embarrassing position of gentlemen caught naked by a cold wind. This was the conclusion of everyday citizens, of 23 respectable business men, of a jury of average human intelligence. But by the transcendental ethic, it appears, the Commissioners were actually honored by that grotesque exposure. It proved their lofty morality, their superior sagacity!

No other conclusion can be drawn from the public statements of the Commissioners. Nor have they attempted any other explanation of the acts which seem to have surprised and displeased the jury--and not only the jury, but also a respectable portion of the people of Baltimore. Like the moralists of the second part, they have confined their defense to mere abuse of the jury, and of all persons who approve its report. They do not meet the issue clearly and frankly. In the inevitable fashion of virtuosi of virtue, they seek to dispose of all reasonable criticism--and in this case it was very reasonable, indeed--by the infantile device of calling names.

The question whether segregation or dispersion is better for Baltimore may be left to Dr. Goldsborough’s Vice Commission. The Supreme Bench has hitherto settled it, and the late grand jury merely expressed its approval of that settlement, but no harm will be done, I daresay, by settling it all over again. But the question whether the Police Board should lend policemen to private snouters of dubious morals is not one for the Vice Commission to deal with. The body charged with the consideration of such matters is the grand jury--and the late grand jury did its duty. Not all the soughing words of the Commissioners will conceal the fact that they were guilty of a gross and unintelligible imprudence, and that their failure to admit it and apologize for it leaves their common frankness seriously in doubt.