Baltimore Evening Sun (19 March 1914): 6.

What has become, by the way, of the Drip Coffee Chautauqua? A year or so ago it was announced with great flourish of sackbuts and psalteries, and the newspapers, for a space, were filled with news of it. If my memory does not play me a vulgar trick, no less an uplifter than the Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton was to bein charge of it. He resigned his pulpit, in fact, in order to undertake the work, and connoisseurs will remember his epoch-making farewell sermon–a devastating attack upon Pontius Pilate, with sly references to certain other dignataries of the bar. But now, alas, no more is heard of the Drip Coffee Chautauqua. Dr. Straton is engaged vigorously in other labors, and the moral capitalists who were behind him have followed him.

A rear springs unbidden from the blinking eye. Maryland stands in sore need of a first-class Chautauqua. There is at present no rostrum in this fair State upon which such great men as the Hon. Battle Bob La Follette, the Hon. Ben B. Lindsey and the Hon. Richmond Pearson Hobson can conveniently cavort. All the existing halls are too small. Again, there is no suitable arena for New Thoughters and the Swiss bell-ringers. There are children growing up among us who have never once heard the Swiss bell-ringers. There are benighted thousands, old as well as young, who have never witnessed Battle Bob. After Dr. Straton has cleaned up the racetracks, the kaifs and the red-light district, let him return to the shelved Chautauqua. We need it every hour.

A DAILY THOUGHT. While I am an ardent advocate of temperance, I am persuaded that prohibition can never be enforced. It is calculated to make hypocrites and to lead to the manufacture of illicit whisky, replacing the good material with the bad. * * * Prohibition will never be enforced in any Christian country.—Cardinal Gibbons.

Despite the characteristic tricks and numskulleries of the City Council, there seems to be hope still that the new vaccination ordinance, in its amended form, will be made into law in time to be of value. But whatever its fate, the people of Baltimore should not forget the gallant efforts of Dr. Garter and Dr. Jones to have it passed. With these two men in charge of the Health Department, the people of Baltimore may rest assured that nothing will be left undone to promote its efficiency. They are constantly impeded, true enough, by the ignorance and chicanery of the Council, and by the fact that Baltimore has little money to spare for new sanitary enterprises, but they keep at it day in and day out. This sturdy striving should not be forgotten. Such public officials do honor to the city.

If it is eventually passed as it left the conference committee, the new ordinance will insure the vaccination of the whole population without putting needless oppression upon anyone. Those persons who prefer to be vaccinated by physicians of their own choice, and who exercise a reasonable discretion in that choice, will not be interfered with. But those who seek to dodge the law by subterfuge will be brought before the magistrates and made to pay for their sport. All the super-Oslers and beyond-Welches will be neatly smoked out. In brief, the people will gain a larger measure of protection against smallpox, and in addition they will he agreeably entertained by the pursuit of medical New Thoughters—a pursuit just as diverting as that of miserable outcasts, and free from any disgrace to its practitioners.

Whenever such an emergency as the present one arises the misguided fanatics who oppose vaccination seize the opportunity to fill the air with their yammering. On the one hand, they offer “proofs” that vaccination does not prevent smallpox, and on the other hand they offer “proofs” that it does cause all the other diseases on the calendar, from syphilis to cholera infantum. Such “proofs” are copiously supported by the evidence of a vast rabble of mysterious “doctors” and “professors,” and by discreetly edited quotations from the writings of reputable men. We all know how that game is played. The anti-vivisectionists are adepts at it, and of late the prohibitionists have turned to it.

Fortunately enough, it does not fool anyone who takes the trouble to examine the facts. There is, in truth, no such difference of opinion about vaccination as the anti-vaccinationists talk of. Its efficacy is not supported by a mere majority of educated medical men, but by practically all of them. Here in Baltimore, for example, the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Medical School is unanimously in favor of it, and so is the medical faculty of the University of Maryland, and the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the membership of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty. Among these men are pathologists whose professional competence and general good sense no sane man would think of denying. They are all in favor of vaccination. If they are wrong about it, then the whole science of medicine is a delusion and every physician is a quack.

Those anti-vaccinationists who talk of vaccination as “an outworn eighteenth century superstition” are simply burblers of empty words. There is as much difference between the vaccination of today and that of Jenner’s day as there is between surgery now and then, and for precisely the same reason. What was once a purely empirical operation, unclean and dangerous, is now a truly scientific operation, aseptic, harmless and supported by a sound and intelligible theory. The anti-vaccinattonists, of course, deny all this. But their denial, once put to the test, is worth no more than the denial of their anti-vivisectionist sisters that the diphtheria antitoxin is useful in diphtheria. What they actually deny, at bottom, is that such men as Dr. Osler are honest men. This is exactly what the prohibitionists are now denying.

The reflective layman will not allow himself to be influenced by such imbecile buncombe. When it comes to the question of the value of vaccination he will take the opinion of Dr. Osler, and let that of Drs. Bunk and Bonesetter go. And when it comes to vivisection he will prefer the opinion of Dr. Osler to that of the furious old maids, male and female, of the Maryland Anti-Vaccination Society. And when it comes to the effects of the moderate use of alcoholic beverages, he will accept Dr. Osler’s assurance that they are harmless to healthy adults, and pass over the Rev. Dr. Charles M. Levister’s low-comedy and bogus “proofs” that Dr. Osler is certainly an ignoramus, and probably a rogue.