Baltimore Evening Sun (3 January 1914): 6.

From “The Sabbath in Puritan New England,” by the Hon. Alice Morse Earle, page 76:

The ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general snook * * * an informer, both in and out of meeting * * * a constable, an inspector, a sexton, a home-watcher, and above all, a Puritan Bumble, whose motto was Hic et ubique.

The Hon. Mrs. Earle devotes a whole chapter to this primeval snouter, the early forerunner of the modern vice crusader and policewoman. In most of the New England towns there was a tithingman for every 10 families. His duty during the eternal church services on Sunday was to keep the congregation awake--he had a long prod for the purpose---to club the bad boys who grew restless during the preaching, and to drive dogs and hogs out of the meeting-house. When the Doxlogy was sung at last, he chased the congregation home, giving particular attention to “sons of Belial strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the day.”

At other times he was a sort of general moral supervisor in the community, as the Hon. Eugene Levering is in Baltimore today. He had the right by law to stop children on the street and examine them in the Catechism; he was inspector-general of women’s finery, he could enter any private house to raid a card game, to burn a heterodox book, or to tear an “immoral” picture from the wall. In Norwich, Conn., in 1659, a tithingman jailed one Sam Clarke for “hankering about on men’s gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out to him.” Poor, lonely Sam! He has innumerable fellows in the Baltimore of today! Think what a Baltimore Sunday must mean to a young fellow living in a third-rate boarding house, with few friends and nowhere to go!

But what I started out to say is that the name of snook, applied by Mrs. Earle to the tithingman, exactly fits our prowling snouters of today--e. g., the policewomen, the members of the various “moral squads,” the informers of the Lord’s Day Alliance, and the sneaks of the Pentz Society. Snook is from the Middle English snoken, to hunt, to rummage, to snuff about. Its brother in modern German is schnökern, to inhale stealthily through the nose, particularly in a sneering manner, and it has a cousin Icelandic, to wit: snaka, to lie in ambush, to observe surreptitiously, to peep. The Icelanders call a Peeping Tom a snakakerl, and by the same token they call a wife who searches her husband’s pockets a snakfru.

As a substantive, snook is used to designate the Elacate canada, or sergeant-fish, a common denizen of Floridan waters. This quaint beast consecrates his life to the task of pursuing other fish. One never sees him alone: he is always hot after some poor herring or smelt. His greatest joy seems to be to dart into a school of young fish and put them all to flight. This habit, as the French say, swears at his physique, for he is buxom, nay almost matronly, in figure. But still he waddles along valiantly, thus recalling a policewoman in his puffing and heaving almost as forcibly as in his actual snooking.

The Hon. D. Bachrach files my knuckles in today’s Letter Column for the crime of condoning the confiscation of the products of honest toil, while leaping with horror over the notion of confiscating the property of haughty and hunkerous laudowners. A crime, indeed, if I were really guilty of it, but it happens that I am not. In this very place, no longer ago than last Wednesday, I admitted the morality of taking the Hon. John D. Rockefeller’s accumulations away from him, and made no exception of real estate. But what is moral is often far from efficacious or sensible. It would be quite moral, I dare say, to shoot the average City Councilman at sight, but it would plainly do no good, for a special election would be called at once and another jackass elected to his place. And by the same token, it would be quite moral to trim John, but wholly useless, for his talents are such that he would soon get rich again, if not by selling oil, then by running a gambling house, by lecturing in the chautauquas, or by writing books on sex hygiene.

In brief, the objection to the Single Tax, and to all other such perunas, is that they cure the symptoms without curtug the disease. I say disease to complete the figure, but my personal view is that all forms of success in life, including even commercial success, are signs of health. John has made more money than the rest of us simply because he is a better man than the rest of us--because he is less superstitious, less squeamish, less sentimental, less silly. It seems to me a good thing that such gifts should be liberally rewarded. And whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, it is at all events a sure thing. The law of natural selection applies to bank accounts quite as much as to chest expansions. I do not say that this is as it should be; I merely say that this is how it is. I do not presume to criticize the Creator.

A DAILY THOUGHT. Es giebt kein Use das Mann talken thut.--Friedrich Nietzsche.

Advice to a man who wants to shake his wife for another, by the anonymous “clergyman” who conducts the “divorce clinic” on the woman’s page of The Evening Sun:

You can hardly say that God created this affinity for you, for you cannot say that God creates a mate who is to be obtained by a divorce.

Welcome to our old friend “the moral order of the world!” Blame the devil for all our sorrows! Nothing that is unpleasant is ordained of God! This is the central doctrine of Christian Science, and of all other such balderdash. It is unimaginable that a beneficent Creator should have created sciatica: therefore, it does not exist. So, also, saith this unnamed “clergyman”--probably a humorous bartender in disguise. It is unimaginable that the Creator should favor a divorce: therefore, the woman with whom a married man runs away was not created by Him.

What puerile bosh! What a childish evasion of the probtlem of evil! Why not shut off this geyser of wind and give the inquirer--apparently a man of no sense himself--some good advice? For example, why not point out to him that, in the long run, one wife is as bad as another! Why not bring intelligent arguments to bear against his delusion that this affinity will make him happy, instead of controverting it with more rumble-bumble? In brief, why not try to help the poor jackass, instead of merely preaching at him?

Meanwhile, Col. Jacobus Hook has bought two more counties in Cuba and put in 900,000 tobacco bulbs.