Baltimore Evening Sun (6 April 1914): 6.

In Munich uplifters are so rare that the city authorities embalm their carcasses after they are lynched and exhibit them in the Hofbräuhaus.–Memoirs of J. H.

A DAILY THOUGHT. I can stick a knife into a beef and what sticks to the knife will provide the same amount of nourishment that is contained in 800,000 gallons of beer.–The Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday.

One million dollars for the name and address of any scoundrel who will so much as hint that I am not the Original Billy Sunday Man.

Boil your drinking water! Throw out the lifeline! Swat the nascent fly!

Invading the ancient city of Annapolis the other night, for the first time in six months, almost the first man I encountered was my old friend, the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis, superintendent of the estimable Lord’s Day Alliance. The genial doctor reported business very brisk, with impious open-Sunday bills bobbing up on all sides. But it takes a very sharp backward-looker to get ahead of so accomplished a watchman, and I found most of these bills in the ash barrel when I proceeded to investigate them. There was one, however, that still showed the breath of life: to wit, a bill allowing the sale of soda water and chewing tobacco in Cumberland on Sundays. This bill, drawn up by the devil in person, was three laps ahead of Dr. Davis, and making very good speed. Well, well, let him not repine. The score is still in his favor.

The lobby was thronged with other uplifters and forward-lookers, among them the Hon. Ed Hirsch, the Hon. Max Ways, the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus, the Hon. Sonny Mahon, the Hon. Bibb Mills, the Hon. George Lewis and the Hon. John E. Raine, editor of the Towsontown New Era, the liveliest newspaper in Maryland, now that the Suffrage News has abandoned sex hygiene. The benches along the walls were occupied by the same moribund Annapolitans who have been dying there since the year 1898. At one end of the lobby a group of country delegates were buying chocolate Easter eggs and having them inscribed with such names as Maggie, Myrtle and Lizzie. Fact! The yap lawmaker grows civilized, voluptuous, epicurean. The old-time hen’s egg, dyed with calico, no longer contents him.

But he still chews tobacco as he meditates upon the great problems of State, and he still uses his desk in the House chamber as a rest for his feet. The chamber itself retains the pungent, miasmatic aroma of eld: a mixture of five-cent cigar smoke, withering floral tributes, ethyl alcohol, unwashed patriots and formaldehyde. The bathing facilities at Annapolis are ample in summer, but somewhat reduced, it would seem, in winter. The Senate chamber reveals gentler manners and a less powerful bouquet. The Senators, in the main, are gentlemen of dignified habit, and many of them use excellent English and can spell some of the hardest words in the dictionary. Thus democracy goes to pot, and the common people are betrayed.

A fringe of suffragists surrounded the Senate, apparently sitting up with the corpse of the suffrage amendment, killed by the too-much kindness of the Just Government League. Issuing from this sad scene I enjoyed the honor of being presented to the Hon. Cy Cummings, the celebrated backward-looker, and the delight of contemplating his lofty peaks and battlements. Cy was full of chuckles, the result of a trick he had lately played upon the moral element in the House. The trick consisted in offering an amendment to the Eastern Shore gallon-a-month bill, forbidding any importation of alcoholic beverages whatever. This amendment forced the bogus drys to come out into the open and vote against actual prohibition. They swallowed the dose with wry faces, and good Cy was doubled up with jocosity. Such is the uplift!

Issuing anon into the lobby I found the Hon. Max Ways and the Hon Ed. Hirsch as busy as beavers. Ed. told me that he was representing the Schley Monument Committee, and that Max was lobbying for a bill forbidding bull fighting within two statute miles of the Central Young Men’s Christian Association Building. It seemed somewhat improbable, but I did not pry into the matter. The Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus conducted his business, whatever it was, by promenading the lobby with the dogged assiduity of a lion in a cage. I passed him 74 times and he cut me dead in front of the Easter egg counter. Nevertheless, 1 still venerate the man, and wish him well. Even the wisest of us is apt to guess wrong. I, too, thought that the Hon. William H. Anderson would triumph, and so did Anderson himself. There were thus three of us on deck when the scow went down.

Which recalls the great change that Anderson’s passing has made at Annapolis. Time was when the slightest noise behind a Legislator made him jump five feet into the air and rush headlong for the woods, but now even the most timorous of them wears a bold face, and is not afraid to chuck the Hon. Bibb Mills under the chin. But beneath this new assurance there is still an undercurrent of dread, and its object is the Rev. Dr. Tom Hare, Anderson’s pianissimo successor. Dr. Hare, true enough, never yanks off a scalp or gouges out an eye, but nevertheless he is strictly on the job, and the general opinion at Annapolis seems to be that he will do deadly execution in 1916. As one of the city leaders in the House told me:

That gink don’t hardly say nothing, but he is a wise one all right. From what I hear, he is getting the old maids and the Sunday-schools in line all over the State, and if some of us guys don’t watch out something is going to happen to us. Anderson was a tough one, but a body always seen exactly where he was at. But this Hare does his work on gum-shoes, and when you think he is somewhere, you can make a safe bet he ain’t. Whenever I think of what he done in West Virginia it makes me sick.

With which words, he returned to the consideration of the great problems of State, and I made off for the train. It was my hope and intention to pay my respects to the Hon. James McC. Trippe (not Joseph, as the Sunpaper calls him), the estimable Speaker of the House, but he was in the pulpit during the whole of my visit to the State House, and so I was baulked of this privilege. The Hon. Mr. Trippe has a hard job. Not more than 30 per cent. of the members of the House can speak English as it is taught in the seminaries, and most of those who have the art are in the habit of exercising it through a poultice of macerated long cut. What they say is thus hard on the ears, and when comprehended, even harder on the higher cerebral centres.