Baltimore Evening Sun (12 November 1913): 6.

Headline from the estimable and unhumorous Sunpaper:

TO GO FOR ARMOR MILL

President Baker Says M. And M. May Be Depended Upon.

Up march the Honorary Pallbearers in their shiny plug hats, their elegant black gloves, their soft, pianissimo sneakers! All that remain is for the Hon. Embalmer Dickey to gild the corpse and screw down the lid.

A DAILY THOUGHT. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.--Matthew, xxiii, 25.

The estimable Hot Towel on last night’s anniversary meeting at the First Presbyterian Church:

[The Rev.] Dr. Oliver Huckel * * * stated that, in his opinion, before another century and a half have passed it [sic] would see * * * the increased christianization of all the Christian denominations.

A pious hope, but Dr. Huckel gives it plenty of time for fulfillment. Discretion here! It will take at least century and a half, I daresay, to put down the prevailing Mohammedenism. So long as the vice crusade enlists all the rich old deacons and the Hon. William H. Anderson remains pope of Maryland, the Beatitudes will be honored far more in the breach than in the observance.

The Hon. Al Jennings, the celebrated outlaw, on his experiences as a prison clerk in the current Saturday Evening Post:

Part of my duty was to interrogate incoming prisoners concerning their private lives. * * * One of the qeustions was: “To what do you attribute your downfall?” In nine cases out of ten the experienced prisoner answered “Drink.” Men who never tasted liquor, because they didn’t like it, returned that answer just the same. To begin with it was a good, easy, conventional reason * * * and then it gave the burglar, the murderer and the counterfeiter an excuse to work up sympathy. Men who had served many terms used to smile as they said it.

And yet how eloquently the whoopers-up of prohibition discourse upon these prison statistics! Every sane man knows that crooks, as a class, are very sober men, just as politicians are very sober men, but every tear-squeezer is full of “proofs” that the rum habit is to blame for all crookedness. And not only for all crookedness, but also for all disease. A few days ago, for example, the so-called Civil Liberty League was arguing publicly that drink killed 1,000 Maryland men every year. Nothing could be more idiotic, and yet no other argument makes so strong ab impression upon the untutored mind. All the quacks, medical and lay, support it; all the scientific and honest physicians, led by Sir William Osler, laugh at it.

Next the legislative investigation of the Civil Liberty League, with the Hon. Lloyd Wilkinson as chairman of the investigating committee!

Scarcely a word in the newspapers about the proceedings of the great Purity Congress at Minneapolis! All the supreme virtuosi of virtue gathered together under one tent, gyrating in three rings, sailing through the air like toy balloons, emitting sobs like the thunder of the sea–and yet no more than a few lines about it in the public prints, and those lines in obscure corners!

What better proof could one desire of the corruption of the press? It is the hireling of the Vice Ring, just as it is the hireling of the Liquor Ring. Too prudent to engage in open reviling of the chemically pure, it yet combats them in secret ways. When they make speeches in public, it cuts down the report of those speeches to a few lines, making them nonsensical and ungrammatical. When they send in their photographs, it refuses to print them. When they are pursued by rascally grand juries, it publishes the painful fact. And when they seek free puffs for their “sex” books and other such moral merchandise, it forces them to take space for paid advertisements.

No wonder the world goes downhill no swiftly! No wonder the struggle for social asepsis is an enterprise of such copious bafflements! The press is holding out for graft: it will have to be bought. Well, why not buy it? Why not outbid the white slave traders? The Hon. William H. Anderson bribed the friars minor and is still in good standing among the forward-lookers. Let the other volunteer archangels do likewise. Let them win with their bar’ls, as they have lost with their bellowing.

The Hon. Cosmo Hamilton, the English fictioneer, upon a volunteer book censor now cavorting in London:

A third-rate prude with a pornographic mind.

Respectfully referred to the Hon. Anthony Comstock, C. P., for cogitation and report.

Rising to a question of personal privilege, I hereby denounce the low miscreant who appeared under my name (and apparently in one of my shirts) at Osler Hall last night, playing the piano with the skill of a ship chandler pulling a tooth. The occasion was a concert of the Doctors’ Orchestra, and I attended in my capacity of musical critic to the Maryland Suffrage News. Imagine my astonishment to find my own name upon the program and to see a fat man in tight pantaloons come forward when it was called! And imagine my horror when this aditiose counterfeit fell upon his piano like a chef upon a tough tenderloin, or an osteopath upon a soft, juicy patient! Such sounds, believe me, I never heard before. The fellow actually made the piano bounce! Once I saw it move at least six inches.

An attempt at spoofing, or the foul plot of some secret enemy? I incline to the latter theory. Everu man who engages in moral endeavor must expect to be knifed now and then by the backward-looking. There is not a leader of the uplift in all our fair city who does not bear his deep, wide wounds. The Hon. William Hf. Anderson has been accused of every crime in the repertoire, from simony to moonshining, and many of them, as the saying goes, have been proved on him. Dr. Howard A. Kelly, the most ascetic of men, has been denounced as a libertine. The Rev. Dr. Kenneth G. Murray has been deceived and made a mock of by dealers in moral green goods. The Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, LL. D., has been currycombed and salted by a licentious grand jury. Even the Rev. Dr. W. W, Davis, that zealous friar, has been violently abused by the bibuli. I, too, I suppose, must pay the penalty of ethical assiduity, of inordinate virtue. The baffled hosts of darkness must have their hack at me.