Baltimore Evening Sun (28 March 1914): 6.

From a literary cablegram in the cultured Sunpaper:

Fonegaray, the great Spanish dramatist.

A hitherto unknown rival, it would appear, to Don José Echegaray. A prize pupil, no doubt, of the Bozart.

57 to 42!

The first organized opposition to the uplift has made its appearance in Atlanta, Ga., a city in which all sorts and conditions of quacks, from prohibitionists to vice crusaders, have been whooping like mad for three or four years past. The intelligent people of the town tire of the buffoonery at last, and have just organized a Citizens’ League to put it down. This Citizems’ League will devote itself to a sort of crusade against crusaders. On the one hand, it will call a halt upon the mad manufacture of utopian laws and ordinances, and on the other hand, it will bring to book those ardent mountsbanks, lay and clerical, who seek to advertise their own virtue by exaggerating the sins of their city. In brief, it will convert the present gay irresponsibility of the uplifters into a personal and embarrassing responsibility, and so clip their flapping wings.

Atlanta has suffered enormously from the uplift. Not only has prohibition filled the city with fake clubs, speakeasies and drug-crazed negroes, but, in addition, there has been a violent vice crusade, and as a result the social evil is getting out of hand. Behind all these moral monkeyshines, as in Baltimore and elsewhere, there has been a small group of well-to-do fanatics, and again as in Baltimore, they have sought direct publicity by inserting flaming advertisements in the newspapers. The gentlemen behind the Citizens’ League tire of such advertisements--their unctuous phariseeism, their shameless distortion of the facts, their preaching of a Marshmallow goodi-goodness, their unwarranted libels upon Atlanta. And they propose to combat them by teaching the truth.

Here in Baltimore the same sort of reaction toward sense and sanity is inevitable, but we are not yet ready for it. The uplifters still have a good way to go. We must first have prohibition before ever the people awaken to its dangers. We must first have a genuine vice crusade, wild, barbarous, ecstatic, before ever they can taste its terrible effects. But in the long run a recrudescence of sanity is bound to come. If the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday invades the city in the spring of 1916, as now seems probable, he will be just in time to turn the tide. His six weeks of clowning will break this back of the uplift. Once he has departed with his swag, the public intelligence will reassert itself, and there will be a general attack upon that wholesale quackery which now prospers so amazingly.

Thus the uplift has its ups and downs. Who remembers the prohibition uproar of the fifties, during which Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Rhode Island and New York went dry? Who remembers the Great Awakening of 1734-44? What has become of the the thousands converted by Moody and Sanky? Why did the devil make such short work of the converts of the Rev. Sam Jones?

The Rev. Dr. Stuart Maclean, in the Churchman, on the hubbub stirred up by Dr. Sunday in Pittsburgh:

One’s eternal welfare became the topic of the dinner table.

A welcome relief from one’s internal welfare! Down with damaged goods and up with damaged souls!

Disappointing news note in the estimable Sunpaper:

[The Rev. Dr.] Billy Sunday will be unable to come to Baltimore until February, 1916.

And not only disappointing, but also downright tragic. No less than 23 months separate us from February, 1916--and there are 11,000 deaths in Baltimore, on the average, every year. Thus fully 20,000 Baltimoreans will die before Dr. Sunday comes to save us--and 75 per cent. of them, lacking his help, will have to go to hell. Think of it: 16,000 souls lost through one man’s delay!

In the current number of the American Issue the Rev. Dr. Charles M. Levister hauls the hide off the Hon. Ed. Hirsch with the utmost ferocity. A friend and admirer of both gentlemen, I refrain from expressing any opinion as to the merits of this ruffianism. But though Ed. dies, it will be with honor. When he gets to the morgue he will find the remains of Dr. Osler awaiting him.

Rising to a question of personal privilege, I give thanks to that anonymous subscriber who favored me with a bunch of flowers yesterday morning. No name was on the card, but it bore the lugubrious inscription “Für wunde Herzen”–“For wounded hearts.” Alas, alas, at my time of life a man has had his sentimental reverses! My left auricle is a mass of scar tissue, my columnæ corneæ droop like the willow, and my mitral valve is stuffed with immortelles. So ist das Leben!

Incidentally, what has become of the scheme to put powerful searchlights in all the public parks, to snout out courting couples? The hand-holding season will soon be upon us. What is Dr. Kelly’s “small, pesky minority” doing to prevent another saturnalia of kissing and hugging? The situation is plainly beyond the policewomen. There are but four of them all told, and they are not very light upon their feet. And the cops male refuse to have anything to do with such snoutery. What is the “moral element” going to do about it?

Prohibition seems to be working beautifully in Georgia, that moral republic. In the cities both whites and blacks divert themselves with illicit booze, and in the country they take to drugs. According to the Atlanta Constitution of March 21, the latest report of the medical department of the State Sanatorium is “interesting, though rather horrifying reading.” The number of patents landed in the sanatorium by drugs now exceeds, by 25 per cent., the number brought there by alcohol. The actual number of drug cases increased nearly 150 per cent. between 1909 and 1913. Such is the uplift at work!

If you are contemplating suicide, put it off until after February, 1916! Think of the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday and the Legislature of Maryland in session at one and the same time! All we’ll need, to make it perfect, will be a new campaign for the Vice-Presidency of the Hon. D. Harry.