Baltimore Evening Sun (9 December 1913): 6.

The Hon. Douglas H. Thomas does a valuable public service in protesting against the proposed waste of $1,000,000 upon a useless St. Paul street bridge. No more ridiculous scheme has ever been laid before the taxpayers of Baltimore. Why haven’t the newspapers investigated it more thoroughly? Who is behind all this poppycock about the overcrowding of St. Paul street? Who is it that is trying to unload something?

Last call to the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis to recant, repent and lead a better life! I have faith in the essential virtue of the doctor, as I have in that of the Hon. William H. Anderson. Both are good men led astray by unbridled zeal. Now that the doctor has had proof positive that the people of Baltimore, including the majority of clergymen, are wholly indifferent to his mad jehad, I have high hopes that he will change his terms. Let him confine himself to gross and undoubted violations of the day of rest, and cease his petty persecution of poor folk. They have to work hard all week; is it too much to ask that they be allowed reasonable recreations on their one day of ease and recuperation? Does the doctor seriously believe that cheap orchestral concerts on Sunday afternoons would work for immorality? If so, on what ground? I offer him all the space he wants to state his case, and give him my guarantee that not a word of his argument will be suppressed. What is more, I offer to allow him to read in advance and edit to his taste any answer that may be made to him.

The Hon. William H. Anderson fills the current number of the American Issue with affecting farewells to himself, under such headlines as “Anderson May Go” and “Good-by, Mr. Anderson!” Nevertheless, I am still full of hope that his private wire to Heaven will bring him orders to stay. His going would leave an aching vacuum in Maryland politics. Always in the wrong, he has yet fought with all the lofty enthusiasm of a man in the rightm and so his fighting has made first-rate sport for us vulgarians. Ten days after he left us the boozehounds would be reduced to an unorganized, puerile and pitiful rabble. May it never come to pass!

Meanwhile, the judicious will pray that the hon. gent.’s “call” to “higher” work and a “broader” field will not set a fashion among the other bogus “experts” who now delight us. It is bad enough to have our clergy breaking into the papers with such bumcombe every day: it would be unbearable if the lay virtuosi of virtue should also take to the habit. Imagine the Hon. Eugene Levering getting calls from Paris, Cincinnati and Monte Carlo! Imagine the Hon. John L. Cornell summoned to Gomorrah! Imagine the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis dragged screaming to Munich! The face blanches at the thought of such horrors, the mere suggestion of such monkeyshines.

The New York correspondent of the estimable Hot Towel on the recent revival of the preposterous yarn about women being kidnapped and sold into white slavery by banditti armed with hypodermic syringes:

The result of the report has been to spread alarm among women shoppers, not only from New York homes, but also from neighboring towns, making them timid about trusting themselves unprotected in the Christmas shopping crowds.

And another result has been to bring forth a lush crop of “victims.” Just as every crook puts the blame for his crookedness upon drink, thus defending his own virtue and pleasing the uplifters, so every prostitute accounts for her fall by the formula that happens to be fashionable. A year ago all of them had been driven into prostitution by the low wages paid in department stores; before that they had been seduced by mock marriages; before that had been lured into houses of ill fame by benevolent old ladies infesting railroad stations. Now they will begin to show the marks of the fatal hypodermic: every arm will blossom with wounds! And the sentimental will fall for the bosh once more.

Outrage reported by the estimable Sunpaper:

An order recently passed by the Liquor Board prohibiting women from being served with drinks at public bars has been communicated to the police and will be strictly enforced by them. It applies to the whole city, without exception.

What have the suffragettes to say of this fresh evidence of masculine hunkerousness and selfishness? Up, girls, and at ’em! Lay on, dear hearts!

Certainly, a wide and tempting field awaits that new Unpopular Review which Henry Holt & Co., the New York publishers, announce today. Why, indeed, has no one thought of starting it before? Never in history has there been a nation more hideously beset by quacks and mountebanks. Our newspapers reek with fallacies; our churchcs are turned into grotesque Hyde Parks; in every department of human thought, from government to sport, and from infant feeding to epistomology, the clowns are making ten times as much noise as the honest men. Every American city swarms with bogus “experts” of a hundred ridiculous breeds, and the country as a whole is committed to all the sophistries known to logic.

It is against all this that the new review will set its face, and with Mr. Henry Holt in the editorial chair there is certainty of a sharp and intelligent attack. Mr. Holt, it need not be said, is anything but a cynic. He has devoted all the leisure of half a century to constructive reforms, and more than once he has gone ahead of even the most radical public opinion. But no man could be less the merchant of social perunas, and so he is peculiarly fitted to make war upon the prevailing Munyons and Lydia Pinkhams.

New York will be the home of the new review, but it is sincerely to be hoped that the unexampled clinical material in Baltimore will not be overlooked. Here flourishes every variety of fake known to bunkology. We have theologians who out-Dowie Dowie, and scientists whose science is that of the madhouse and uplifters who burst blood vessels straining at the communal boot-straps. The local newspapers glitter with the marvelous discoveries of our bogus penalogists, whooping prohibitionists, moral pornophobes, tinhorn archangels, self-consecrated popes, sugar-teat Socialists, hysterical suffragettes. We wallow in the New Thought.

The Unpopular Reveiw, I dare say, will have something to say, soon or late, about every one of these gay performances upon the contra-bass syllogism in E flat–not in the spirit of idle muckraking, but in that of honest truth-telling. There is room for such a publication, and to spare. All our existing reviews show-the color of the dominant manias. The facts of life need a spokesman.

Boil your drinking water! Beware of white slave traders armed with hypodermic syringes! Swat the fly!