Baltimore Evening Sun (24 March 1914): 6.

Hell–a place in which prohibition is actually enforced.

A DAILY THOUGHT. I try to do my part to free the human mind from slavery.–William Godwin.

The Hon. Theodore Dreiser, author of “Sister Carrie,” hailed by Arnold Bennett, Frank Harris, William J. Locke and others as the greatest living American writer–the said Dreiser on the uplifters:

The pigmy, illiterate minds of these creatures would fall to pieces if their owners undertook to read a book on philosophy. What do they know about life and its workings, or real religion? They take their feeble ideas from the impractical illusions of misapplied Christianity. They walk around with the Commandments stuck in their eyes, blind to the whole wide world about them.

Unearthly remark of the Hon. Phillips Lee Goldsborough, LL. D.:

I am a member of the Navy League, which is in favor of building more warships, but I am greatly interested in the peace movement.

Nevertheless, such dual personality is not unusual in Maryland politics. There are even Eastern Shore job-holders who burble for “pure” politics.

My learned friend, Dr. O. Edward Janney, makes a sagacious protest in the current Suffrage News against the proposed war of revenge upon the Democratic party, which persistently refuses to whoop for woman suffrage. Various man-eating suffragettes, enraged by this recalcitrancy, now bellow for Democratic gore. What they propose is a furious attack upon every Democratic jobseeker who rears his hideous head, to the end that the rest may be duly scared into insensibility, and so drugged into camp. But Dr. Janney is not convinced that this characteristic scheme will work. Says he:

It is difficult to see how attempts to fight a party on this issuue will accomplish the desired result, but it is easy to understand how the party leaders will be irritated and embarrassed thereby, and the advance of the movement somewhat checked.

A sound objection. The more the suffragettes threaten and roar, the more firmly the Democratic leaders will stand against them. The more they try to defeat individual Democrats, the more the rank and file of the party will resent it. In brief, the more they turn aside from their proper propaganda and engage in general politics, the more they will run the risk of heavy penalties and reverses. Many Democrats are in favor of them today, though the party as a party still holds aloof. What they propose to do, at bottom, is to throw these votes away.

But has it never occurred to Dr. Janney that the suffragists run exactly the same risk when they engage in other extra-suffrage campaigns? For example, the vice crusade, so dear to his own heart? Is he not well aware that the vast majority of sane and healthy males in this community, including those of his own profession, are uncompromisingly opposed to that crusade? True enough, all of these opponents may be scoundrels, as the more bitter suffragettes maintain, but a scoundrel is still a citizen--he still has a vote--and that vote is sorely needed by the cause. Is it ever going to be won by outraging his pet prejudice? Is he ever going to be brought into line by violent and ludicrous campaigns against the “strictly male”?

Dr. Janney and his fair associates had better give calm consideration to these questions. They have already done incalculable harm to the cause of equal suffrage by saddling their extravagant fads upon it. There are thousands of men in Maryland who believe in it at bottom. I myself know hundreds of them. In point of fact, fully two-thirds of the men I know are more or less friendly. But not one of these men would care to have anything to do with the Just Government League as it is at present constituted and operated. The more they read its low comedy pronunciamentoes and denunciations, the more they snicker. They have no belief in its perunas; they have no belief in the common sense of its bosses. And so long as woman suffrage, in this State, is inextricably identified with such childish balderdash they will hold aloof. And so long as they hold aloof woman suffrage will fail.

The New York Sun on the Mann “white slave” act, that “moral” rubbish:

Will the official admission that the Mann “white slave” act is being industriously worked by blackmailers surprise anybody? It should not. The law could not have been better designed for the purpose of extortioners if it had been deliberately written to encourage their trade.

Here the Sun errs. It could have been better designed. To remedy its defects there is the Kenyon bill, now before the Legislature of Maryland. That bill, which is backed by the same pathetic fanatics who fathered the Mann act, lifts blackmail to the dignity of a fine art. Once it is passed, no snouter need ever work again.

The Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, LL. D., on the menace of buncombe and perunaism:

amiable visionaries cannot be given license for mischief ad lib; we may smile at the anti-vaccinationists, while we have no reason to fear smallpox; but a threatened epidemic makes their doctrine and practice by no means matters for laughter.

But this, of course, doesn’t apply to the vice-crusaders. Dr. George Walker may protest to the Legislature all he pleases: the moral matadors of the Bonaparte-Levering-Pentz Society must have their fun.

Sagacious murmurings of the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough in the current Municipal Journal:

A man may destroy the opportunity to make two dollars tomorrow by clutching a selfish method of making one dollar today. It is senseless to talk about loyalty to the city and then strike a wounding blow at the most vital spot. Every dollar spent at home * * * keeps home wealth at home.

Where is there match for Aristides? Who is his peer, now that Samuel Smiles is dead?

And after Billy Sunday has come and gone, let us change the name of Baltimore to Zion City and elect the Rev. Dr. John Roabh Straton Mayor.

The Hon. Dan Loden is in favor of every bill that the Legislature has passed and against every one that it has rejected, bar none.--Adv.

The best novel of the current crop, to the best of my knowledge and belief:

“The Making of an Englishman.” By W. L. George (Dodd-Mead).

Whoop, whoop! Here comes the vice crusade! Load the old squirrel rifle and unchain the hound dogs!