Baltimore Evening Sun (17 February 1914): 6.

The Hon. Mary Shaw in the current Maryland Suffrage News:

The great trouble in the theatre of today is that there is no woman note in its policy. * * * The actress plays the drama that the manager approves of, and the woman playwright writes the play to suit his notions.

With all due respect for a much esteemed friend, Stuff! In the drama of today, whether on the stage or on the screen, man is sinking rapidly into the fixed role of swine, scoundrel and poltroon. The principal object of that drama, so far as one may gather it between paroxysms of mal de mer, is to convince every married woman that her husband is a walking pestilence and her son a hound of working girls, and to make every flapper look forward, with gloomy certainty, to her kidnapping by white slavers, her imprisonment in their glided den, and her release through the embarrassing entrance of her rascally old father, come there to buy the latest captive. The drama of yesteryear made man heroic: he was a handsome lover, a gallant soldier, a docile husband, a loving father. But in the drama of today his one use is to reveal the infinitely superior merit of woman. At best, he is a doddering ass, led by the nose by a suffragettish wife. At worst, he is a combination of streptococcus, Don Juan and the Rev. Dr. Hans Schmidt.

My abject apologies to the Hon. S. M. Wood, editor of the estimable Democratic Telegram, for intimating the other day that he had been canned by the Hon. Dashing Harry for greasing the immoral City Club. He explains in his current issue that his name was dropped out of the flagstaff of last week’s Telegram through the carelessness of a printer, presumably in liquor. It is pleasant news that the Hon. Mr. Wood is still on the job. He is an editor of undoubted gifts, and has a mellifluous and voluptuous literary style. May he make enough out of the Telegram to retire rich, as the Hon. George Arnold Frick, LL. B., did before him.

TWO CHALLENGES. 1. To the Rev. Dr. John I. Yellott, of Belair, to deny on his honor that he wrote a letter signed “Clergyman” in the Evening News of February 11. 2. To the Rev. Dr. C. D. Harris, to give me the same space in the Southern Methodist that he got in The Evening Sun.

In the city of Detroit, wherein, according to the Hon. Jack Cornell, all “commercialized vice” was stamped out last autumn by a vice crusade, no fewer than 90 women were arrested last week charged with “being disorderly persons, being keepers of disorderly houses and operating blind pigs”--i. e., selling liquor without licenses in houses of prostitution. They were all arraigned before Police Justice Jeffries on Friday morning; all save two were dismissed. The two were fined $5 each. “They might have escaped,” says the Detroit News, “had they elected to plead not guilty. But they pleaded guilty and the Court had no alternative.”

All of these women were taken in raids inspired by that “moral element” which delights in such sports. The police, it may be presumed, entered upon the business reluctantly, and they now find it impossible to gather enough evidence to convict, even with the aid of volunteer snouters--one of whom was denounced from the bench, by the way, by Judge Jeffries. Says the Detroit Free Press:

The police have now no self-confessed “lines” on the women of the underworld. Under regulation their real and assumed names, antecedents and descriptions, together with other personal information, were on record, and were held over the women as clubs. Now, however, if the victim fights, it’s a rare case of submitting cold proof.

The police tried to introduce in evidence the records kept before the vice crusade, but Judge Jeffries ruled them out. “The police,” he said, “eliminated vice, supposedly, from this city on October 15. From that time these women are presumed by law to have led the lives of angels.” In other words, dispersion tied the hands of the police by wiping out all the evidence on their books--evidence supplied, under regulation, by the women themselves, and hence admissible in legal proceedings when necessary. Under dispersion, it must be obvious, very few women will ever admit that they are prostitutes--in the Detroit cases, 2 out of 90--and in the absence of such admissions it is next to impossible to convict them.

Harassed by paid snouters and sensation-makers on the one hand, and halted by the courts on the other, the police of Detroit are in an embarrassing and unfortunate situation. They must make incessant raids in order to avoid the accusation that they take graft from women, and yet they know perfectly well that these raids do no good. The same vicious circle is being run by the cops in Chicago, Milwaukee and all the other cities that have been “cleaned up.” It is the sworn purpose of the Society for the Suppression of Vice to give Baltimore the same sort of show, and to that end, as I have showed time and again, its managers and agents are not above any sort of deceit and obfuscation, how gross and shameless. Imagine a “moral” organization which sends “experts” to Annapolis to mislead and hoodwink the members of the State Senate!

The following bill has been prepared by learned counsel and will be submitted to the Legislature during the coming week:

AN ACT to prevent and punish the procurement or attempted procurement of legislation by deception and false representations. Section 1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Maryland, That any person who shall appear before any committee of the General Assembly of Maryland or of either House thereof and make false representations regarding the subject matter of any bill or resolution pending before the General Assembly, to the end that the said bill or resolution shall be enacted or passed or that existing acts shall be repealed or amended, or who shall attempt in any other manner to deceive or mislead the members of the General Assembly, or any of them, shall be guulty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not less than $50 nor more than $250, or by imprisonment in the House of Correction for not less than one day nor more than five days, in the discretion of the Court. Section 2. And be it enacted, That this Act shall take effect from the date of its passage.

Further contributions toward a proposed list of new and original names for vaudevillains:

Æschylus and Euripides. Opsonin and Sarcoma. The Caffeine Sisters. Cheyne and Stokes. Pizzicato and Arco. Adenoid, the Operatic Tenor.

Boil your drinking water! Watch the Federated Charities come back! Root for the mother’s pension bill!

Seven weeks more–and then the grand escape! How the time drags!