Baltimore Evening Sun (7 April 1914): 6.

Things unheard of in Marvelous Munich:

The Lord’s Day Alliance. Near-beer. Police women. Smallpox. Soda water. Typhoid fever. The Ministerial Perunion. Chautauquas. Christian Science. Havre de Grace. The Maryland Suffrage News. Sex hygiene. Baseball. Cold-storage eggs. Key West cigars. Malaria. Snoutery.

I wish I could add the Sunpaper, but the fact is that I have seen it on sale in the lobby of the Bayerischer Hof.

A DAILY THOUGHT. God can come back. Jeffries can’t, but God can.—The Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday.

The second issue of the Unpopular Review, just out, contains a long and interesting article upon a matter I have often discussed in this place: to wit, the habit among uplifters of inventing and exaggerating “wrongs” and “curses” in order to make a better market for their perunas. The author of this article cites many specific instances, chiefly from the uplift magazines. The loud bowwow over “child slaves” in the coal mines is a perfect example of the current rumble-bumble. The census of 1910 showed that there were but 8,161 mine workers under 16 years old in the whole United States, and that but 3,117 of these were working below the surface. The number of workers under 16 in all the factories of the country—including the canneries, by the way—was but 161,493. And yet we have to listen to endless poppycock about “millions” of children “enslaved,” and to all sorts of grandiloquent plans for their “rescue.”

On the subject mortality the uplifters whoop and roar with equal mendacity. Borrowing bosh from the Socialists, those fathomless reservoirs of the commodity, they argue that “the enormous death rate among children under 5 years” is due to the economic changes of “the last 50 years,” involving the removal of “millions of women” from the home to the factory. But what they conveniently overlook is that this “enormous death rate” has been falling steadily during the whole of the 50 years, and that its present rate of decline is vastly greater than ever before. As a matter of fact, the factory mother of today probably loses fewer children than the most assiduous home mother of 1865. The average woman of that day had seven or eight, but she usually lost four or five of them. A family in which there were no deaths among the children was practically unknown. Today such families are very common, even among the poor.

But the vice-crusaders are the chief merchants of these new and super-moral statistics. On the one hand, they try to make it appear that one-seventh of all the adult males of the country are “damaged goods”—a sheer imbecility, known to be such by every intelligent physician. And on the other hand, they try to make it appear that most of the diseases peculiar to women are due to the scoundrelism of their husbands—another and even worse imbecility. Unless I am gravely misinformed by medical men of the highest standing, far more cases of feminine “appendicitis” are caused by efforts at race suicide than by the so-called “social” diseases. But about this fact the vice-crusaders are conveniently silent, just as they are silent about the fact that 99 per cent of the prostitutes they “rescue” are merely having fun with them.

The author of the Unpopular Review article points out the serious dangers that lie in such shameless exaggerations. They produce a general unrest among sentimental and misinformed persons—i. e., among the majority of newspaper and magazine readers. These persons, seeing “wrongs” and “curses” on all sides of them, come to the conclusion that “the existing order of society is a failure,” and are ready “to welcome almost any experiment that holds out the promise of something better.” Hence the current prosperity of parlor socialism. All the uplifters flirt with it inevitably—for example, the Hon. Young Cochran, the Baltimore Savonarola. And their quick and uncritical enthusiasm lights up thousands of persons whose credulity is even worse, and so the money rolls in and the band plays and the whole country is deafened by the din.

Bitter remark of the editor of Public Ownership:

The Free Lance, who runs the booze column on the editorial page of The Evening Sun, is not a lance at all; he is an undisinfected hyperderrnic [sic] needle full of dope.

Well, well, do not repine! Booze is the natural element of a Socialist, and dope won’t hurt him. But suppose it were soap!

As Legislatures go in Maryland, the one just carted from the scene was of a considerable degree of virtue. It pursued an independent and courageous, and on the whole, an intelligent course. It took no orders from any of the “moral” bosses. In the matter of the oyster, it resisted the commands of the estimable Sunpaper; in the matter of the highly dubious city bills, it resisted the sweet seductions of the Hon. Sunday-School Field, LL. B., and in the matter of the racetrack, the social evil and other such “curses,” it turned its back upon the “moral element.” Let its members go home with the thanks of all well-disposed and unsentimental citizens. Right or wrong, they plowed their own furrow. For better or for worse, they done their darndest.

Meanwhile, what has become of that fair young pastor who was but lately announcing the going dry of Gay Old Govans? Perambulating that vicinage yestere’en, I found it highly damp. In truth, kaif shouldered kaif, and in one, at least, a capital brand of blutwurst was on the free-lunch counter.

The Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton in the suffering Letter Column:

Professor Mencken.

Professor of Moral Psychiatry and Unnatural Theology; privat docent in Pathological Psychology; lecturer in the Jura Singulorum.

Boil your drinking water! Read the Towsontown New Era! Swat the Musca domestica!

The effects of prohibition in Waterloo, Iowa, as described by the Hon. R. C. Thompson, Mayor thereof:

Waterloo has not gone dry. * * * The legalized saloons have been closed for over a year, but the use of intoxicating liquors and habit-forming drugs continues, the latter undoubtedly on the increase. While the abolishing of the saloons has * * * deprived the public funds of over $40,000 in license revenues each year, it has not by any means destroyed, or, as I verily believe, decreased the use of intoxicating liquors.