Baltimore Evening Sun (6 December 1913): 6.
From the Hon. Young Cochran’s “religious” adverisement in this morning’s Sunpaper:
--Authorized and paid for by a group of men interested in making manifest the Social Implication of the Gospel.
A visible improvement upon the false and impudent claim formerly made:
–This advertisement is authorized and paid for in the interest of the work of the churches of Baltimore.
But though the bogus imprimatur is thus abandoned, the same old puerile balderdash is still ladled out in the name of God. The late Karl Marx, it appears, is “as famous in the realm of economics as is Galileo in the realm of physics”--which will probably be news to Dr. Jacob H. Hollander and the other economists of Johns Hopkins. By the same reasoning, Dr. Munyon would be a great pathologist and the Hon. Sunday-school Field, LL. D., a great theologian.
Great, indeed, is Corbran--or, to be more accurate, the bar’l of Cochran. Let him but blow a blast upon his bugle horn, and the doctors of divinity come sliding down the pole like firemen--to hear a Carr prove that renting a room to a working girl a capella is more immoral than living in the room with the same girl! Such is the power of a consecrated wad! Such is the sniveling uplift!
Four ships, with a gross capacity of 7,328 long tons, are now under charter for the Eastern Shore Relief Expedition, and negotiations for two more are in progress. As soon as the fleet is assembled it will be sent to one of the shipyards down the harbor to be refitted. Each of the ships will be painted white from truck to keel, signifying purity. The fleet will begin loading with guaranteed distilled and fermented liquors as soon as the Legislature meets, and the moment the anti-speak-easy law is passed over the Governor’s veto, it will steam at full speed for the suffering Shore.
Those persons who desire to make the trip on one of the relief ships, and so witness the distribution of honest wines and liquores to the Shoremen, and the destruction of the blind pigs and speak-easies, are requested to send their names to the Hon. Ed Hirsch, 545-553 Equitable Building, chairman of the relief committee. There will be room on the six vessels for about 300 guests. The expenses of the trip will be paid by assessment, the share of each guest being about $40. This sum will pay for three or four days of pleasant voyaging on the bay, with a private view of the distribution of relief jugs.
The Hon. Mr Hirsch expects to have more than 200 first-class kaifs established on the Shore within 48 hours after the anti-speak-easy bill becomes a law. The bar fixtures are being sent down already, and the work of erecting them will begin in a week or so. There is nothing in the present law, of course, prohibiting the construction of a barroom: all that it forbids is the open sale of honest liquors. Therefore, the barrooms will be made ready in advance, so that they may be stocked, licensed and opened for business the moment the bill is passed.
The Hon. Mr. Hirsch’s agents, who have been canvassing the Shore with great care for a month past, report that there are now 8,569 speak-easies in operation between the Elk river and the Virginia line. They sell, it is estimated, about 20,000 barrels of near-beer and 100,000 gallons of fusel oil whisky each week–in brief, enough to poison 250,000 strong men. The Shoremen, of course, have been drinking such noxious stuff so long that they have acquired a high degree of immunity to it, but even so it slowly undermines their constitutions, and the death rate among them is now alarmingly high. This will be reduced fully 50 per cont., it is believed, by the introduction of cleanly and unadulterated cordials, guaranteed under the pure food and drugs act.
In many other ways a burden will be taken from the suffering Shoreman by the re- establishment of the licensed kaif. In one county, for example, the pursuit of blind-piggers now costs the taxpayers $200,000 a year–$125,000 for the maintentance of an armed and mounted constabulary, $50,000 for the upkeep of two gunboats and $25,000 for legal and medical expenses. Once the kaif is set up in this county, the bill will be cut down to next to nothing. Under license a very small police force suffices to keep order--and that police force is paid by the license holders.
A DAILY THOUGHT. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of Heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, nor suffer ye them that are entering to go in.–Matthew, xxiii, 13.
Latest feat of the Hon. Mr. McCay McCoy, as recorded by the immoral Evening Sun:
According to figures given out at the City Hall, contractors have laid new blocks at as low a figure as $3.00 a square yard. The McCay job cost $4.25 a square yard. * * * The Paving Commission will not ask McCay to do any more improvement work by day labor. * * *
The Hon. McCay McCoy’s statement of his political and ethical principles, as recorded in The Evening Sun of April 1, 1912:
We will take care of the men who voted for us. They are our first care.
From the virtuous Hot Towel’s report of the sinner-bake of the Lord’s Day Alliance:
The Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis * * * lauded the co-operation he had received at the hands of both the Police and Liquor License Boards. He scored the grand jury for its lack of co-operation. * * *
The accolade! This grand jury, like its predecessor, has shown a fixed determination to discriminate between honest and reasonable efforts to enforce the laws and the sinister snouting of professional sinhounds. It has refused to be made a party to schemers for collecting money from the pious; it has declined to become the sedulous ape of the Pentz Society. The fact that it is displeasing to the Rev. Dr. Davis is the best of all assurances of its good sense. All that remains, ere it may take full rank with the jury which preceded it, is that it be denounced publicly by the Hon. Alfred S. Niles, the Hon. John L. Cornell, the Rev. Dr. Kenenth G. Murray and the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, LL. D.
Joys of the uplift in “dry” North Carolina, as described in an Asheville dispatch of December 3:
Five hundred gallons of whisky, gin and wine were poured into the sewers here today. Deputy sheriffs performed the task in the presence of witnesses, of whom one was overcome by fumes and had to be carried into the Courthouse. The liquor was seized in raids on local drug stores. The whisky seized in hotels was given to the hospitals.