Baltimore Evening Sun (26 December 1913): 6.

Meanwhile, the city morgue is draped with holly and mistletoe in honor of the Greater Baltimore Committee.

A DAILY THOUGHT. Hand me the roses while I’m alive; don’t wait until the undertaker puts them in my hand.–Prof. Alexander Geddes.

No matter how virtuous an uplifter, no matter how sublime his invention for extracting all the original sin from man, he cannot expect to escape the low, licentious slanders of backward-lookers and down.pullers. It has been so with the Hon. Ben B. Lindsey, the Hon. Samuel E. Pentz and the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, LL. D., and it is so with the Hon. William R. George, founder and, pope of the George Junior Republics. Penalogy and pedagogy have wreathed the skull of the Hon. Mr. George with bays: he is as sure of immortality as the deathless inventor of the Emmanuel Movement. But while “experts” and “right-thinkers” thus venerate him, the criminal classes seek his goat. ’Twas ever thus, from childhood’s happy hour!

Specifically, the State Board of Charities of New York denounces the George Republic at Freeville, N. Y., as a joke and a nuisance, and says that its effect upon its “citizens” has been anything but uplifting. The board charges that it has exposed them to temptation and lured them to immorality, and what is worse, that it has accustomed them to the notion that wrongdoing is necessary and inevitable. The jail system, so prominent a feature of all these George Republics, is responsible for this last. In the jail at Freeville there are cells for 28 prisoners, or 22.4 per cent. of the total population. If the people of Baltimore were assumed to be as vicious, the city jail would have 166,000 cells and would cover more than 100 city blocks!

But, fortunately enough, such considerations and allegations do not corrupt the loyalty of true “experts.” As has been well said by the Hon. Lyman Beecher Stowe, secretary of the National Association of Junior Republics, the George scheme has “been recognized by leading progressive educators and penalogists” as a sovereign balm for all the ills of adolescence, and so the contrary opinion of “a single State board” is of no weight or consequence. That board, no doubt, is made up exclusively of incorrigible backward-lookers--perhaps of men deliberately chosen for their hunkerousness by the “liquor-vice ring,” that omnipresent hobgoblin. Such villains cannot halt the uplift. It must roll on forever, greasing and caressing humanity with its opiate juices.

From a Paris cablegram in this morning’s American:

Embonpoint has put an end to the romance of Princess Sophia and Prince Eitel Fritz, second son of the German Emperor. * * * Friends of the couple say the principal reason for their estrangement is that the Prince has recently grown very stout. * * *

Respectfully referred to a select committee consisting of the Hon. Charles A. McCann (chairman), the Hon. A. H. McDannald and the Hon. C. C. Rohr. I have warned them all!

Meanwhile, Back River is preparing for next summer’s rush. The moment the weather breaks, all the trees will be whitewashed and the drinking benches will be painted a warm, adhesive green. At one of the resorts, so I hear, a new and very elaborate Sunday bar, with accommodations for 3,000 bibuli, will be built. The architect’s plans are full of very ingenious details. For example, patrons will enter the place one by one, and through a narrow passageway. At one point in this passageway the floor will be mounted on hinges, and in the adjacent wall there will be a peep-hole. Whenever one of the Hon. Wes Creamer’s cops penetrates to the spot a lever will be yanked and the disconcerted bull will drop 80 feet into tidewater. Already a scheme is on foot to lure the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis into the trap, but the learned doctor, it need not be said, is a specialist in avoiding such ambushes.

From an article on “Our Alcohol: Its Uses,” in the January number of the Unpopular Review:

It is tragic, on a Saturday evening in Edinburgh or Glasgow, to watch the hampered laborer and tradesman swilling liquor against the ticking of the clock in a rash attempt to swallow enough before the terminal hour of 10 to carry them through the intolerable Sabbath. This is a dark picture, for which the fanatical absurdity of the Scotch law must, in the main, be held responsible.

To what extent is our own idiotic Sunday law responsible for like hoggishness nearer home--for example, for the sodden, deliberate boozing which goes on at some of the so-called fishing shores? How many Baltimoreans get drunk on Sunday for the simple reason that no more decent amusement is permitted? In particular, how many new Baltimoreans, the immigrants within our gates, men brought up under more civilized laws?

From the Koran, Chap. II, entitled The Cow:

Kill them whenever ye find them * * * Thus shall be the reward of infidels.

One more (and not the last) proof that the Puritan is vastly more Moslem than Christian.

Ten thousand dollars cash to anyone who will point out a single point of actual difference between a sentimental man and a boozy man. Is it or is it not a fact that sentimentality is a sort of auto-intoxication, a mild self-induced delirium? Suppose, for example, you saw one of your friends standing before a Christmas tree, his eyes full of tears and his voice raised in the murder of a carol--what would be your first thought? Obviously, that the poor fellow was seriously in liquor, perhaps on the verge of mania a potu. It would take positive and overwhelming evidence to convince you to the contrary, and even after you had been convinced there would still linger a fair aroma of suspicion.--Adv.

Col. Jacobus Hook smashed all previous records yesterday by giving away 54,350 cigars, 19,700 stogies and 500 cheroots. He now has the 1913 championship cinched. Gen. James Young, his nearest competitor, is 28,825 cigars behind him.

Boil your drinking water! Watch Anderson come back! Throw out the lifeline!

The Hon. James McEvoy, president-designate of the plupious Police Board:

I am willing to hear suggestions.

Suggestion No. 9: Remember the Pease-Dietz case.

Suggestion No. 10: Let it be the last of its kind.