Baltimore Evening Sun (4 December 1913): 6.

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

Needed for expenses $5,000.00 Collected to date 2,778.08 Amount yet to be collected $2,221.92 Days remaining 20 Amount to be collected each day $110.96 Amount collected yesterday 27.50

Incidentally, the Sunpaper seems to have thrown up the sponge at last, for it announces that it “has closed its subscription list.”

A DAILY THOUGHT. The taste of that gas was enough. It has killed my love for Ethel.–The Hon. Earl Campbell.

The Rev. Dr. Carlton D. Harris in the current Baltimore Southern Methodist:

This paper has suffered a loss of hundreds of dollars this year by the elimination of medical advertisements from its columns.

One more proof, beloved, that virtue is its own punishment.

The prospect that the coming Legislature of Maryland will deliver the Eastern Shore from the blight and curse of the speak-easy is arousing interest in all parts of the civilized world, for in its ancient “wet” days the Shore was proverbial for its hospitality and good living, and its recent degeneration has caused almost as much sorrow abroad as at home. Hospitality, of course, is impossible in “dry” territory: no gentleman would set a jug of wood alcohol or a seidel of near-beer before a guest. In such territory, indeed, the amenities are unknown: the Puritan is more apt to chase a stranger with bloodhounds than to offer him a glass of licker. But such doings have been wholly out of tune with the history and traditions of the Shore, and with the natural geniality of Shoremen, and so the prospective renaissance of hospitality and gemüthlichkeit is hailed with sighs of joy and relief.

The New York Nation, the Boston Evening Transcript and the Louisville Courier-Journal join in expressing the belief that deliverance is coming jut in time. Says the Nation:

The Shoreman came near cutting off his nose to spite his face. The plain purpose of the various prohibitory laws was to keep the Ethiop from his cups, but their actual effect was to paralyze the whole Shore. A region once given over to the highest delights of social intercourse, a section of the Old South preserved in the midst of Northern commercialism and vulgarity–this smiling demesne was suddenly overrun by fanatics. The result was swift and pathetic decay. The Shore became poor, and not only poor, but also cold and forbidding.

The Independent, while admitting that this picture of the Shore’s decay is not overdrawn, thinks that it should be easy, by remedial legislation, to bring about a renaissance. It says:

The Shoreman of the palmy days is still the same old Shoreman. All he needs is a decanter of 20-year-old applejack on his sideboard to restore his self-respect and make him once more the ideal type of American gentleman. No man who remembers the Shore as it was before prohibition fell upon it like a blight can view the impending war upon the speak-easy with anything but pleasure. The Legislature of Maryland will earn immortality if it but delivers the most lovely section of the State from this incubus. The blind pig has cost the Shore millions and has almost ruined civilization there. Every lover of the true, the good and the beautiful will welcome the return to older and more expansive ways.

These views are concurred by the Washington Mirror, the New Orleans Picayune, the New York Call, the Wall Street Journal, the Outlook, the Woman’s Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. A subscriber to the last-named, writing from Easton, says that Talbot county is looking forward to deliverance with impatience. Says he:

The speak-easy has not only filled our people with poisonous chemicals, and so increased our death-rate, but it has also nearly emptied our treasury. Our public schools had to close early this year for lack of funds to go on. In the nearby city of Salisbury, formerly one of the most orderly in the world, there has been a carnival of immorality, and almost every week some scandalous affair there has been reported on the first page of the Baltimore Sunpaper. And in Cambridge and vicinity, once a health resort, there were 18 cases of typhoid fever during the month of October.

The Philadelphia Public Ledger, after quoting this letter, prints a dispatch from a correspondent sent into Dorchester county to study the effects of prohibition upon the peasantry. He reports that the average yield of wheat per acre has creased 6.74 bushels since the appearance of the blind pig, and that farmers who formerly struck out for the deep licker only twice or thrice a year–say on Christmas, Mother’s Day and the Fourth of July–are now soused regularly every Saturday night. What is more, there has been a lot of sciatica among the horned cattle, and the fruit trees have suffered from hyperaesthesia. Finally, there have been two serious rows in church choirs in Cambridge, and in the lower neck of the county several sharpers have been at work selling Mexican rubber plantation stock to the muszhiks.

The Chicago Daily Tribune and the New York Evening Post both regard it as remarkable that the Eastern Shore has stood the evil effects of prohibition so long. According to the Post, the “dry” laws were passed, not at the request of the Shoremen themselves, but as a result of intriguing by jealous Western Shoremen, who thus sought to put the Shore, as the Post has it, on the bum. The scheme worked only too well. Once the far-famed “Garden of Eden” of the South, the Shore has been surpassed of late by the “wet” counties of Southern Maryland, in which a formidable boom is in progress. The German, Dutch and Scandinavian farmers who are now restoring Southern Maryland to fertility and prosperity have avoided the Eastern Shore on account of the speak-easy. They are a very temperate and peaceful folk, and have no liking for boozing and rough-house. Besides, they believe that all licker-shops should be licensed and taxed.

Not only the papers that I have quoted, but also many others are showing interest in the approaching deliverance of the Shore. And some of those others are printed in foreign lands–for example, the London Morning Post and the Paris Temps. The Eastern Shore, of course, is well known in Europe as the home of the diamond-back terrapin, the canvas-back duck and the Chesapeake oyster and crab, and the European papers, especially the two I have mentioned, are disposed to blamed the recent decay of all these celebrated victuals upon the general demoralization of industry following the introduction of the speak-easy. A man who drinks prune whisky and near-beer, says the Temps, cannot be expected to distinguish between terrapin and muskrat, even on the hoof, and that loss of taste and sensibility on the Shore has had its evil consequences upon the whole of Christendom.