Baltimore Evening Sun (7 January 1914): 6.

One year ago today the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus, LL. D., was converted to local option. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away!

Strange, strange remark of an anonymous connoisseur in Monday’s Letter Column:

I think that Dr. Joshua Rosett is as great a man as the Hon. Frank A. Munsey.

Still waiting for the right hon. gentleman’s statement of his reasons!

A DAILY THOUGHT. A gentleman is any man who can get more than even odds on his word of honor.–Rabindranath Tagore.

What is to be done about the Pratt Library? The capacity of the main building on Mulberry Street has been reached; it was built to hold 200,000 books, and 200000, books are now on its shelves. Already, in fact, the overflow has begun. Dr. Steiner has begun to put up shelves in the cellar and to store books in a house on Cathedral Street owned by the library trustees. In three or four years more the old building will be so badly crowded that it will be difficult to get at the books. And meanwhile, it becomes wholly impossible to set aside a special room for students, so badly needed ever since the library was opened, and equally impossible to adopt the modern open-shelf system.

The original endowment of the Hon. Enoch Pratt is now insufficient to meet the running expenses of the institution. It amounts, I think, to about $50,000 a year--a large sum back in the early eighties, but not enough to keep up the central library and its branches today. The city of Baltimore will help it out, during 1914, with an appropriation or $42,300. But even with this aid, the library will still have an absurdly low income. The public library of St. Louis receives more than $225,000 a year from the city, that of Pittsburgh more than $275,000, and that of Cleveland more than $325,000. Even the cities of the second rank, such as Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Buffalo, spend vastly more upon their public libraries than Baltimore.

In all other directions the City Council and Board of Estimates are liberal enough, but they seem to set but small value upon the Pratt Library. They gave more money, during the year just closed, to St. Mary’s Industrial School, and almost twice as much to the Free Bath Commission. They gave nearly as much to the House of Reformation for Colored Boys and spent five times as much on Bayview Asylum. The Councilmen themselves got $13,000 more than they gave to the library. It cost more to run the city law department, and nearly as much to run the City Library--a useful institution, to be sure, but still one of much less direct value to the people than the Pratt.

But what is to be done? The tax rate is already so heavily burdened that it can stand little more. The obvious remedy is to float a loan, but here again there are objections to be met. In the first place, Baltimore’s funded debt is now almost at the maximum of prudence, and in the second place, a loan would not solve the problem of maintenance. A new building, costing, say, $500,000, would mean an additional expense of at least $30,000 a year--nearly a cent on the tax rate. Interest on the loan and a provision for the sinking fund would add another cent.

Such are the difficulties in the way. But the needs of the library are so pressing and its public usefulness is so large that something must be done without delay. Who has a suggestion to offer?

Hygienic note from the estimable New York Press:

Two deaths from typhoid fever among 80,000 men, or one death in 40,000, is the record of the United States Army for 1913. * * * One hundred and thirty-four deaths from the same cause among a population of approximately 600,000 persons, or one death out of 4,500, is Baltimore’s record for the year.

Typhoid fever was formerly the scourge of the army, as it still is of Baltimore. Five or six years ago, the mortality ran up to 3 per 1,000 per annum--the equivalent of 240 deaths from typhoid in 1913, instead of the two that actually occurred. The reduction was brought about by the use of the typhoid vaccine devised by Sir Almroth Wright--a gentleman, by the way, who is now denounced as a rogue and an ass by the suffragettes because of his refusal to admit that women are more virtuous than men. (Here in Baltimore, in fact, there are eminent suffragettes who even deny that he is a competent pathologist. I mention no names!)

What the typhoid vaccine has accomplished in the army it might also accomplish in Baltimore. Even today the gradual extension of its use in private practice is slowly cutting down our death rate. This reduction is commonly credited to the chemical treatment of the city drinking water, but if that treatment were really responsible typhoid would be almost stamped out, for the water is now wholly sterile. The completion of the filtration plant will probably have but little more effect. In Washington, where a modern filtration plant has been in operation for at least half a dozen years, typhoid still rages. There, as in Baltimore, direct contact is probably the most frequent means of communicating it, and against direct contact the only practicable protective device is vaccination.

But it is difficult to make the petty politicians of the City Council understand this. They are always ready to appropriate the city’s money for spectacular and useless purposes, but so far they have shown no intelligent interest in the typhoid problem. As for the Hon. Dashing Harry, that monumental pile of brains, he has chiefly devoted himself, in the past, to denying that typhoid is endemic in Baltimore, and to howling objurgations at all persons who tell the truth about it. This is one of the penalties that Baltimore pays for submitting to government by mountebanks.

The Hon. Charles M. Levister, D. D., heir and assign of the lamented Anderson, continues his foul attack upon the estimable Deutsche Correspondent in today’s Letter Column by denouncing its late indictment of prohibition as a mass of “mendacious statements” and “wild exaggerations.” To such depths has the art of argumentation sunk in the forensic studios of the Anti-Saloon League! Not a word in honest rebuttal! Mere invective, vituperation, empty words! Ah, woe! Ah, woe, woe, woe!

Legislator: one paid a large salary to express opinions that are not worth hearing. Journalist: see Legislator.