Baltimore Evening Sun (16 December 1913): 6.

Whatever the merits of the Pease-Dietz case, now so painfully agitating the beauty and chivalry of Locust Point, it is certainly absurd to protest against the Police Board’s snouting system as something new, unprecedented and most horrible. As a matter of fact, that system has been operating since the present Commissioners took their seats, and its fruits have been praised with enthusiasm by all our constituted virtuosi of virtue, from the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, LL. D., to the plupious Sunpaper. True enough, the cops themselves have viewed it with very bilious eye, and at one time they even went to the length of organizing a counter-system on the ancient Gothic principle of dog eat dog, but so far as I could make out when the scheme was unearthed moral opinion was overwhelmingly against them, and at all events they got no public encouragement. And since then, as we all know, the gentleman who beat them at the game--i. e., outspied and outsnouted them--has been appointed to an office incompatible with any degree of ethical sensibility save the highest.

Personally, I confess to a considerable prejudice against all those subtle devices and inventions of the New Morailty. I am sorry for the cops who have to do their work with spies on their tracks, and I am more sorry for the cops who have to do the spying--which last commiseration, it is interesting to note, seems to be shared by at least some of the Commissioners. But inasmuch as the tune has been lined out, it is the plain duty of every cop to dance to it, and it is equally the plain duty of every forward-looking citizen to choke down his ensuing disgust. Great moral benefits are impossible without compensating costs. In the face of so sweet a boon as a force trained to boozehounding and the vice crusade as superbly as terriers are trained to the chase of rats, it is obviously necessary to forget the fact that an occasional product of such moral hyperesthesia is apt to be what more sinful men denominate a cad.

Cartoon idea respectfully suggested to the Hon. MM. McKee, Barclay, Tom Bee, Ace Gibbs, et al:

{illustration}

The germ of this suggestion, by the way, comes from “Ye Annapolis Almanac,” a learned work just issued in the Sleepy City by Prof. Dr. W. O. Stevens. I commend this almanac to all seekers after curious and valuable information On Page 2, for example, there is the first authentic account of the founding of the Sunpaper, and in particular, of the Hon. Cain McAdam’s assassination of his brother for doing it. And the connoisseur of the graphic arts will be gratefully caressed by the illustrations. In brief, a noble contribution to history and art.

The Maryland Suffrage News on the report of the Pittsburgh Morals Efficiency Commission:

The report * * * is the work of [the Hon.] George Seibel, whose investigations led him to write “The Leper,” a play presented in some of the Western cities.

Always there is a play in the background; and if not a play, then a series of Chautauqua dates, and if not a series of Chautauqua dates, then a book on “What Every Boy Should Know”; and if not a book, then a nice, fat job!

Der Achtb. Jacobus von Hook, at midnight last night, was 379 boxes ahead of his last year’s cigar-giving-away record. If all goes well, he will close the year 1913 with a score of 199,650 cigars, 218,600 stogies and 922,175 cheroots. His factories in Cuba have deunded 712 acres of Vuelta Abajo tobacco, and he has destroyed five groves of cedar trees in making boxes. The horsepower of all the cigars he has given away, taken together, would be sufficient to bounce the Courthouse 872 feet in air. He has used enough chromatic bands on his cigars to decorate nine annual conventions of the Colored Odd Fellows.–Adv.

The Hon. William Allen White, in the Emporia Gazette:

Some day, “some blessed day when the mists are cleared away,” we hope to be able to print a paper that will tell the truth about quack preachers and all the hypocrisy of the infernal, mechanical clap-trap done in the name of the Lord.

What! In Emporia too? In Elysian Kansas, that “dry” and plupious republic? Exit the theory that Baltimore has them all!

The first page of this week’s Democratic Telegram is given a voluptuous sort of beauty by an elegant water-color view of the Hon. John Walter Smith, the doomed victim of the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus. Within the Telegram praises the Constitution as “the sheet anchor of our liberties,” quotes Prof. Dr. Raleigh C. Minor against the initiative and referendum, predicts that the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt will try to hog the Republican nomination in 1916, and prints a large platinotype of Westminnter Abbey. Again the Sunpaper escapes censure. Can it be that a clandestine love affair is in progress?--Adv.

Don’t let him go, gents! He has his faults, true enough. The clergy are less innocent than before he came among us. It is still a long, long walk to victory. But where are you going to find another such gladiator? Where are you going to get a super-Anderson?

Last call to the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis to break down, own up and beg for forgiveness! For every scintilla of evidence that he brings forward that orchestral concerts on Sunday afternoons would promote debauchery, I hereby offer and pledge him a genuine Porto Rico cigar--one cigar for each and every scintilla, with the blue sky as the limit.

Send 50 cents to the Maryland Suffrage News, 817 North Charles street, for a copy of Christabel Pankhurst’s “Plain Facts About a Great Evil.” Hot stuff, indeed! Take my word for it: it made me blush! And I hadn’t blushed for 17 years!–Free Adv.