Baltimore Evening Sun (11 November 1913): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

The Rev. Dr. James Shera Montgomery, of Washington:

Love is infinitely higher and diviner than anything.

A Solomon come to judgment! The Washington Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough! Nay, the Washington Phillips Lee Goldsborough!

A DAILY THOUGHT. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.–Benjamin Franklin.


Three great rallies of the “forward-looking” and chemically pure now engage the devil and his angels. The twentieth annual convention of the Anti-Saloon League of American began at Columbus, Ohio, yesterday and will continue until Thursday, when a grand chicken dinner will bring it to a close. Last Friday the seventh international Purity Congress met in Minneapolis and is still in progress. And on December 8 the so-called International Humane Congress, a sort of kommers of anti-vivisectionists, will break loose in Washington. Three massed attacks upon the forces of darkness! Three semesters’ pious rough-house!


The quality of this trio of congresses is well exhibited by the calibre of the delegates sent from Baltimore. At the Anti-Saloon League affair the principal representative of our fair city will be the Hon. Joshua Levering, brother to the incomparable Eugene and himself a militant moralist of the first eminence. At the alleged Purity Congress the local delegates will be the Rev. Dr. Kenmeth G. Murray, chaplain to the Lanvale Street Bastile for lady humors, and the Hon. John J. Cornell, successor to the lamented Pentz as attorney-general and chief rhetorician of the Pentz Society for the Scorching of Sinners. At the camp-meeting of zöolators Baltimore will be represented by members of the Maryland Anti-Vivosection Society, a fact to fill the heart of every intelligent Baltimorean with pride.


The Purity Congress will bring forth a noble company of performing archangels, most of them with something to sell. For example, the Hon. Barratt O’Hara, author of “From Figg to [Jack] Johnson.” For example, Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, author of a very profitable series of “sex” books for the young. For example, the Hon. Richmond Pearson Hobson, the celebrated long-distance osculator and one-man Chautauqua. For example, the Hon. Ben Steadwell, Jr., editor of The Light and wiskinski-general of the movement. And so on and so on. All the political mountebasnks will be there, and most of the press-agent preachers, and a strong party of Chautauquans. No doubt the exchange of moral ideas will have its echo, within a few weeks, in a new outburst of vital statistics and a renaissance of pulpit pornography.


Meanwhile, my spies bring me news that that all the “forward-lookers” are now hotly discussing the relation of the income tax to the white slave trade. As every schoolgirl is painfully aware–if she isn’t, she must be deaf, dumb and blind–there are now more than 200,000 professional white slave traders in the United States, and their average income is above $10,000 a year. In addition, there are 100,000 politicians who belong to the various liquor-vice rings, and __,000 professional vice crusaders and tear-squeezers, with average rackets of $5,000. Would it be decent for the Federal Government to share in the profits of such men? If not, how can the plain mandate of the law be evaded?


Here is a legal question of the first magnitude, but fortunately enough, the vice crusade brings forward juriconsults of the highest learning and sagacity to grapple with it. In the centre of the sublime sanhedrin sits the Hon. C. J. Bonaparte, C. J., the modern Blackstone, and to either side of him are the Hon. Clifford G. Roe, J., author of the Mann White Slave Act, and the Hon. William Squire Kenyon, J., apostle of the Iowa Red Light Law. With such gigantic juridic intellects concentrated upon the problem it should be speedily and affectingly solved. Each one of these men has bitten his immortal nick in the shank of jurisprudence; taken together, they constitute the greatest array of legal talent gathered in one posse since the abolition of the Courts of Pié Poudre.


The Hon. J. W. Bernhardi, Mus. D., in the Letter Column:

I believe [the Hon.] Mr. Mencken is up to some deviltry.

The inevitable assumption of one with a skinful of platitudes–i. e., of the average “right-thinking” American. Give him more platitudes, and he will venerate you as a philosopher. But show him the naked truth, and he will think that you are trying to spoof him.

Certainly there is good sense in the efforts now under way to establish rooms of moderate price for obstetrical cases at the Hospital for the Women of Maryland. The more the custom grows of dealing with such cases in hospitals the better it will be for both mothers and children. The home is no place for surgery, not even for obstetrical surgery. The right place is a well-equipped hospital, with a competent nursing staff and facilities for meeting emergencies. Civilization has little more use for the midwife than for the leech and the barber-surgeon. At her best, she is a second-rate nurse. At her worst she is a dangerous and intolerable quack. And even with the noblest of intentions, she cannot be expected to carry a hospital with her.

But she still flourishes in Baltimore, and chiefly because she is cheap. Prospective mothers of the middle class, which means the majority, are forced to look to her. They don’t want to accept charity from the hospitals and they can’t afford to pay the high rates demanded for private rooms and competent nursing. It is the aim of the ladies of the Women’s Hospital to remedy this condition of affairs. They propose to establish private rooms which will be let at a moderate price–low enough to bring them within the means of ordinary persons and yet high enough to cover all reasonable expenses. They want to reach the women who are neither rich enough to afford Ritz-Carlton rates nor poor enough to take charity. And in that enterprise they deserve the support of all persons interested in the sort of philanthropy which combats misery without making paupers.

The more the Hon. John Walter Smith thinks of the Hon. Isaac L. Straus’ “conversion” to local option the more he larfs and larfs and larfs.—Adv.

Boil your drinking water! Weep with Cochran! Watch Bob come back!