Baltimore Evening Sun (9 February 1914): 6.

Advice to those members of the Legislature who boast in the barrooms that they are going to vote against the four blackmail bills: Get in line, gents, get in line! I have seen the evidence that is going to be used against you if you don’t!

A DAILY THOUGHT. Bigotry murders religion--and then tries to friggten fools with her ghost.–The Rev. Charles Caleb Colton.

The next election will be a good time to try out stuffing again, to see if it is still against the law.

The Hon. John E. Cornell, successor to the lamented Pentz, before the Judiciary Committee of the State Senate:

Commercialized vice can be suppressed. * * * Such cities as Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Detroit have performed this supposed impossibility.

Witness: any drummer who has been in Chicago of late!

Space offered for the names of prominent Baltimoreans honest enough to confess that they earned their first dollars by knocking down four cents a week from their Sunday-school nickels:

Statement of campaign expenses in accordance with Chapter vii, verse 27, of the Acts of 1908:

The venerable Wegg, of Belair and Havre de Grace, writing in today’s Letter Column, detects and exposes me in a stupid error--no less, indeed, than that of crediting the well-known words, of Jesus, in John xiiii, 32, to St. Paul. I acknowledge the blunder and submit myself to sentence. It is unpleasant, of course, to be caught in such lapses, but in this case that unpleasantness has a pleasant side to it, for Wegg is one of my old pupils in theology, and it delights me to see that, in the face of very insidious secular distractions, he still keeps up his interest in the science.

The Hon. Hutchins Hapgood on the Garden of the Uplift:

Would you go to Kansas on your honeymoon?

A subtle and probably very accurate test. In all the world is there a single “dry” town that honeymooners frequent? Is Puritanism compatible with happiness?

The Hon. Donald R. Hooker, M. D., on the four blackmail bills:

The passage of the bills offered by the Society for the Suppression of Vice should be unquestioanble in a community which even pretends to uphold monogamy–their enactment into law, however, is gravely doubtful in the face of a strictly male electorate.

In “strictly male” the angelic doctor builded a better phrase than he knew! But let him cheer up, and weep no more. All four bills are going through with a bang. There are not six legislators at Annapolis with courage enough to vote against them, nor even to pull wires against them. This, at least, is the report of my private snouters down there, and so great is my confidence in them that I hereby offer to bet the dr. a good dinner, with or without wine, on the event. And the same offer is extended to the Hon. Eugene Levering, to the Rev. Dr. K. G. Murray and to old Doc Hunner, the supermoral chirurgeon. Be happy, gents! You have a walk-over!

Some anonymous critic put me to the torture in last Saturday’s Letter Column for alleging lately that 891 of the 917 criminals in the penitentiary, or more than 97 per cent., are former Sunday-school scholars, whereas but 62, or less than 7 per cent., are former drunkards. Unluckily for this critic, the figures are not mine, and so I cannot be blamed for them. They are to be found on page 34 of the report of the directors of the penitentiary for 1913, and among the directors signing that report and thus vouching for them is the Hon. John T. Stone, chairman of “The World in Baltimore” committee, chairman of the Anderson-Wilkinson debate and a Sunday-school worker of the highest standing. I need not add, I hope, that the figures greatly surprised me, and that I should never have thought of publishing them in this place had they not borne the imprimatur of Mr. Stone and his associates. Having always found his statements worthy of the utmost credence in the past, I saw and see no reason for questioning him in this case.

The Rev. Dr. M. H. Lichliter in the Maryland Suffrage News:

One of the many humorous elements in the nation-wide debate on equal suffrage has been the assumption that the granting of the vote to women would immediately usher in a political and social millennium.

What! Can this be treason? Has Dr. Lichliter never heard of Dr. Donald R. Hooker’s proofs that the suffrage will knock out alcoholism and prostitution at one fell stroke, and abolish wife-beating, bossism and measles, and stop the barking of dogs, and fill the Sunday-schools, and repeal the double standard of morality, and make it impossible for a dead cat to lie in an alley more than four minutes? Has he never heard of the New Housekeeping, the science of the kaffeeklatsch applied to government? Is he a doubter of the uplift?