Baltimore Evening Sun (3 February 1914): 6.

Headline on an advertisement in yesterday’s Sunpaper announcing tonight’s whooping match for the Kenyon bill at Osler Hall:

THE SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE OF BALTIMORE CITY AND THE MARYLAND SOCIETY FOR SOCIAL HYGIENE

Notice the shameless subordination of the Maryland Society for Social Hygiene (i. e., the Hooker Society) to the Society for the Suppression of Vice (i. e., the Bonaparte-Pentz-Levering Society). The former organization has long disguised itself as a semi-medical body, and has even gone to the length of claiming the president of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty as its president ex officio. But the truth is, of course, that it is really nothing but sort of one-cylinder adjunct to the Vice Crusade, with which, as everyone knows, not 15 per cent. of the members of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty have any sort of sympathy.

Curiously enough, the headlines which I have quoted disappeared from he notices of the Osler Hall meeting during the day, They were visible in the morning papers, but not in the evening papers. Can it be that the few remaining medical members of the Society for Social Hygiene objected to such abject subservience to an organization already denounced by one grand jury and dismissed with contempt by a dozen others? Can it be that even the moral members found it difficult to swallow such a pill?

The estimable Democratic Telegram of this week gives over its front page to a large bow view of the Hon. Dan Loden, Master of the Jobhounds, showing him in his new spring suit and with his bangs clipped back to the anterior fontanel. Dan is a pretty fellow, and his portrait, neatly framed, would adorn any parlor. In its literary section the Telegram denounces the county unit rule system as undemocratic and immoral, announces that the people of Baltimore “appreciate the vigor had force” of the Hon. D. Harry, and predicts that the Hon. Sunday-school Field, LL. D., will soon go to Annapolis to fight for the borough bill. Editor S. M. Wood continues to oil the immoral City Club. Have a care, Sam: have a care!--A FRIEND.

My mail this morning was full of indignant, anonymous letters, all protesting against my protest against the appearance of suggestive pictures in the American Issue, the plupious organ of the Anti-Saloon Leg. I suspect the Hon. Charles M. LEvister, D. D., my ungrateful pupil in theology, of writing those letters, but in the absence of legal proof, I do not formally accuse him. The serpent’s tooth is painful, but I stand by my moral horror. If, as these correspondents allege, the American Issue is free of the least desire to outrage the Hon. Eugene Levering, then why does it always print pictures of females? Why not a male leg instead of the shapely distaff it published last week? Why not a man in the “thermal bath” instead of so attractive a gazelle? Why not a man’s back in the “folding bathtub” picture instead of the ivory vertebræ of a member of the W. C. T. U.?

Bath tubs are used, I believe, by males as well as females. Stockings are worn by both sexes alike. Both have legs, necks, shoulders, vertebræ. Then why this mysterious partiality for the female figure, the female charm? If any member of the Anti-Saloon Leg headquarters committee will answer the question in terms intelligible to moral science, then I shall be glad to give him a hand-painted portrait of the Hon. William H. Anderson, fully clothed, as a small reward for his trouble. If the Hon. Young Cochran steps up to answer, either in a letter for publication or in one of his socialistic advertisements, I shall give him, in addition, a portrait of the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus, in a fur overcoat. Meanwhile, I renew my accusation that the American Issue wallops virtue every time it prints such an intimate view of beauty, and in support thereof I offer in evidence the exact words used by the Hon. Mr. Levering in denounciug the late “September Morn.”

Nothing ain’t hardly heard no more, it seems, about none of them stuffers no more, hardly.–Adv.

Text of the bill to make vice-crusading safer and more profitable, to encourage and protect blackmailers, and to otherwise “amend Article 27 of the Code of Public General Laws of Maryland,” now before the State Senate:

Any person who shall visit or frequent a house of ill fame, or any house or room, for the purposes of prostitution, or become an inmate of a house of ill fame, shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment in Jail or the House of Correction not exceeding 90 days, nor less than 10 days, or by fine of not more than $100 nor less than $10, or by both fine and imprisonment.

If the professional snouters who are behind this bill really want it to help them in their business they will do well to improve it with several minor amendments. On the one hand, it leaves the exact nature of “a house of ill-fame” somewhat vague, and on the other hand, it provides a loophole for sinners in the phrase “for the purposes of prostitution.” The first defect is of relatively small consequence: the courts have readily provided a definition of “house of ill fame.” But the second, if I do not err, will make it very difficult to convict, or even to indict, for it must be obvious that, even in the case of an undoubted “house of ill-fame” a visitor may easily disclaim all “purposes of prostitution,” and, what is more, may convince a jury. In the case of “any house or room” the difficulties visible are still greater, for even an act of admitted immorality there may not involve actual prostitution.

I therefore propose that the smuthounds in charge of the measure look carefully to its terms, to the end that its weaknesses be remedied. Here, roughly put, are the amendments I propose:

Any person, male or female, who shall visit, whether once or oftener, a house in which unchaste persons of either sex reside, or in which they are visitors, whether for the purposes of prostitution or for other immoral purposes, etc., etc.

Here, of course, I merely borrow from the Mann White Slave act. The clause, “or for other immoral purposes,” is the meat of the cocoanut. It is this clause which lifts the Mann act above the Common Law it has supplanted. The Common Law already provided an ample punishment for the stray rogues who share the profits of immoral women; it remained for the Mann act to provide the same punishment for the victims of those women.

Meanwhile, the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus remains the last and greatest of the local optionists, left blooming alone.

Incidentally, it is amusing to hear that the Sunpaper got its tip on the Police Board scandal from the Pentz Society.