Baltimore Evening Sun (29 November 1913): 6.

Balance sheet of the Sunpaper-super-Mahon Christmas tree fund:

Needed for expenses $5,000.00 Collected to date 2,666.09 Amount yet to be collected $2,333.91 Days remaining 27 Amount to be collected each day $86.44 Amount collected yesterday 152.00

Going up! Don’t shoot! I’ll come down!

The Hon. William H. Anderson on his invitation to clergy and laity to join his Coxey’s Army of boozehounds:

The letter did not say or even intimate that the expenses of any member of this committee would be paid.

Extracts from the said letter, verbatim et literatim:

The great National Convention at Columbus * * * voted to send a committee of at least 1,000 men to Washington * * * to call upon the President, Secretary of State and both houses of Congress. * * * In behalf of the Maryland League I hereby invite you to go as one of Maryland’s official representatives.

However, I do not press the point. No doubt the Anti-Saloon League thinks it moral, and even highly clever, to “invite” a poor friar to a junket–an then stick a bill for $2.80 under his nose. By the same process, I suppose, it established the morality of the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s notorious effort to debauch the clergy and shake down the deacons. The super-ethic differs from that of ordinary sinners. What would be thouught scandalous in a bartender is far above the average of conduct in a boozehound.

As for the rest of the Hon. Mr. Anderson’s strident protest in today’s Letter Column, I leave it to the solber judgment of honest men. Less than a month ago he was demanding pathetically that the people be allowed to decide all things for themselves, and denouncing all men who objected as rogues and vagabonds. But the moment the people did decide something for themselves–to wit, the question whether or not he should be boss of Maryland–he began howling like a wolf. Once he argued eloquently that the folks of each ward in Baltimore should choose for themselves; now he plans to force dryness upon them by the votes of his yokels. Once he belabored the prohibitionists as extremists and impossibilists, and was belabored by them in turn; now he confesses that he is a prohibitionist himself.

In brief, the whole career of the hon. gent. is one vast tissue of misrepresentations, obfuscations, hypocrisies, absurdities and immoralities. My own sins are considerable, and when I meditate upon them in quiet hours they sometimes make me shiver, but when I turn my thoughts to the Hon. Mr. Anderson I begin to take heart. It may be, as he says, that I stretch a fact, now and them, until it begins to squeak. It may be that ethyl alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine and other drugs have undermined my moral constitution. But I have never lured a clergyman to secret chicaneries; I have never played the money-changer in the temple; I have never done the false messiah; I have never looked into the trusting, cow-like eyes of the common people and then betrayed them. Pondering these things, I gaze down upon the Hon. Mr. Anderson from the lonely crag of a superior virtie and receive his worst accusations with a sniff.

As for his sneer that I violate the rules of fair sport by discharging bullets into a corpse, I challenge him to prove that I have ever called him a corpse. On the contrary, I have persistently argued that he is still very much alive, and have counseled the members-elect of the Legislature, with the greatest earnestness, to proceed to his murder forthwith. True enough, he is more or less mauled and mayhemed. He lost a leg and an ear in the late plebiscite, and he has suffered even worse injuries, so I hear, from certain wings of the “moral element.” But the breath of life is yet in him. He ihas a whoop left, and a wallop. He is good for another semester in the Sunday-schools, another spell of shameless lobbying at Annapolis, another Leipzig at the polls. The fellow has nine lives—and at least three of them are left.

The Hon. James McEvoy, president-designate of the moral Police Board:

I am willing to hear suggestions.

Suggestion No. 5: Keep a sbarp watch upon the policewomen. See that they do not degenerate into mere scalp-hunters and public nuisances. My agents tell me that one of them invaded the private dance of a German singing society a few weeks ago and presumed to tell the assembled mothers and fathers how their children should dance. Parents are better judges of such matters than specialists in psychical shock. Keep the Polly Prys in order!

The great sinner-roast of the Lord’s Day Alliance will begin on December 1 with a series of 24 ward conferences on “Resources For a Better Lord’s Day Observance in Our Ward.” The present Baltimore Sunday, it appears, is still too gay and sinful to please the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis and his estimable friends. The people need a further jacking up, a more vigorous application of the moral screws. Instead of locking themselves in their homes all afternoon, to read the American Issue and meditate upon their infernal future, they dress up in their Sunday clothes and fare forth in quest of debauchery. Some of them ride in the trolley cars; others go walking in the country; yet others, buying 5-cent cigars, smoke them shamelessly on the street corners, or work the chewing-gum machines in front of the candy stores, or push perambulators through the parks, or go to lodges of sorrow, or play penuchle.

It is to the heavy task of putting down all this profligacy that the Rev. Dr. Davis addresses his altruistic endeavors. What his ideal may be I do not know exactly, but obviously he is much discontented with the present state of affairs. That Baltimore is already the dullest city in Christendom on Sunday, that travelers flee from our midst on Saturday nights as from the pestilence, that our people look forward to their one day of recreation with hopelessness and disgust, that we are the laughing-stock of the whole country—all this is too little to please the rev. doctor and his friends. They will not rest content until they have reduced us to a complete state of coma. They will never have peace as long as a laugh is heard on Sunday, or a single human being is happy.

Nearly a year since the last boom! Up, the Hon. Charles H. Dickey, and at ’em! Rise, the Hon. Henry F. Baker, and go to it!

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