Baltimore Evening Sun (10 December 1913): 6.

Embarrassing questions of a correspondent in today’s Letter Column:

Can the Free Lance name any reputable physicians who are pushing the claims of Munyon? Does he find Munyon’s remedies discussed in the leading magazines and periodicals?

Answer No. 1: The late Harvey Hawley Crippen, M. D., was for many years Munyon’s tout, capper and ambassador to England. Answer No. 2: Munyon’s newest and greatest gift to man, the Smo-ko Tobaccoless Cigarette, is discussed at length in this morning’s Sunpaper, page 8, column 1.

A DAILY THOUGHT. To be great in anything you hae to toil terribly.–The Rev. Sydney Smith.

Dr. John S. Fulton’s earnest protest in yesterday’s Evening Sun against the “carrion inventions” of the wild women who now seek to teach their sisters that all men reek with venereal disease, and against the other wild women, “overfed with this slumgullion, who fairly tingle to give ‘nature talks’ to children,” and against the low-comedy physicians, “as superstitious as Bœotian midwives,” who supply such hysterical pornographers with their filthy rubbage–this protest, it goes without saying, will not stop the current campaign of “education.” The taste for the improper is too deep-seated in human nature: once aroused, it must run to exhaustion. And no sign of such a finish is yet in sight. The carnival of smut and buncombe grows wilder day by day.

The Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough, chief platitudinarian to the Hon. Dashing Hary, in the Municipal Journal:

There is no justice in assessing the poor man’s home at its full value and the rich man’s home at three-fourths its value. If a single act of extortion is wicked, a system of extortion is doubly wicked. No honest man would sanction a governmental fleecing of some well-known private citizen.

Soft, suave, slippery stuff! Aristides grows mellower week by week. Once he gets his full growth, the late Samuel Smiles will lose the custard halo, and the Rev. Dr. Orison Swett Marden will be chased from the harmonium. Let Baltimore rejoice in such metaphysical talent.

Last call to the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis to defend the proposition that cheap orchestral concerts on Sunday afternoons would promote immorality and work against religion. I offer the Doctor all the space he wants to present his argument and give him my guarantee that it will be printed exactly as he writes it. What is more, I offer to submit to him the manuscript of any reply that I or anyone else may prepare for publication, and to allow him to strike out any matter that seems unfair to him. And if he is disinclined to print such an argument himself, I extend the same terms to any spokesman that he may select.

Stimulant respectfully recommended to the winded rhetoricians of the Anti-Saloon League:

“The Anti-Alcohol Movement in Europe,” by the Hon. Ernest Gordon. (The Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.50.)

Here is hot stuff, indeed! Here is genuine poison for the Rum Demon.

That affable evangelist who lately sought to woo me to Puritanism by citing the astoundingly inept examples of Bismarck, Gladstone and J. Pierpont Morgan now comes forward with further persuasions, and to them he hitches a challenge. I quote:

You accuse me of classing you among the atheists. No; I will not make you that bad, for you read the Christian bible and some of the printed sermons. I would diagnose you as one who has not properly developed the divinity within you. * * * You ask me to read Matthew, xxiii, 13-33, and Luke, xi, 37-54. I have done so. These verses contain Christ’s scathing denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees of that day. Your purpose is to justify your abuse of such men as [the Hon.] Messrs. Cochran, Levering and Bonaparte, Drs. Kelly and Janney and the Rev. Kenneth G. Murray. Let me remind you that you have not the discerning mind of Christ. What evidence have you that these men belong to that class which Christ derided, and how did you get it? Did your spies bring it in? If so, take those spies out and have them shot. The verdict of the coroner’s jury will be justificable homicide.

A fair question. I attempt a fair answer by pointing to Matthew, xxiii, 25, to wit:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup, and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

I can’t imagine a more succinct and accurate statement of the case against the Puritans. They propose to make war upon sexual vice by putting a penalty upon the admitted brothel and a premium upon the secret brothel. They propose to dispose of the saloon by setting up the speakeasy. In brief, they propose to scour the outside of the cup until it shines like gold, and to trust to luck for the cleanliness of the inside. Such is the plan for making men virtuous by force–a plan which can never get beyond making them look virtuous. I call that plan Phariseeism. It puts the appearance above the substance. Reckoning it at its highest, it is a lamentable piece of self-deception. And at its worst (as when, for example, it is turned to personal profit), it is intolerably dishonest, dangerous and obnoxious.

From a report of an harangue by Dr. B. C. Keister, “a specialist of Roanoke, Va.,” before “a meeting of the scientists and specialists” in Philadelphia:

Dr. Keister said that the medical and criminal records of the country indicated that a complete abolition of the manufacture of habit-forming drugs, including alcohol, would mean 50 per cent. less homicides, 60 per cent. less suicides and 33 per cent. less lunatics. He said the loss to medicine, whatever it might be, from the prohibition of morphine, alcohol, opium and cocaine would be worth while in view of the possible benefits.

I quote from a Philadelphia dispatch in the estimable Hot Towel. Assuming that Dr. Keister is accurately reported, I can only marvel that the City Club did not see him first. How did he sneak through Baltimore without being snared for that great battle royal of intellectual giants, that weekly grapple of the morally gifted, that grand and permanent exposition of revolutionary thinkers? Certainly, those eager “forward-lookers” and “right-thinkers” who have lent their own ears to Dr. Winfoeld Scott Hall, Prof. Dr. Graham Taylor, the Very Rev. Walter T. Sumner and the Hon. Harry Olsen, J., would weep with joy over Keister.

Farewell chant of the Hon. William H. Anderson:

I’ll scrape the mountains clean, old gal; I’ll drain the rivers dry; I’m off for sinful Albanee– Susannah, don’t you cry!