Baltimore Evening Sun (11 April 1914): 6.

Visiting Annapolis yesterday to view the ruins, I was somewhat astonished, and I may add, I hope, unaffectedly saddened, by the damage inflicted upun the Hon. Sunday-School Field, LL B., president of the Sunday-School Trust, and through him upon his venerable master, the Hon. D. Harry. Every brick that fell seems to have scraped the hon. gent. on its way down. He lost his hide, his ideals and. his natural optimism. Xanthous and spiral filaments clung pathetically to bits of debris: mute relics of a beauty that is no more. Here a schnitzel of epidermis; there a tooth; beyond a torn page of the International Sunday-School Lessons. To such an end comes human greatness! Such is the finish of power and glory! Thus perishes virtue, gnawed by the bucolic Huns, fletcherized by the Goths of an immoral press!

Here one turns to the files of the estimable Municipal Journal and the sagacious Democratic Telegram to peruse anew the advance notices of easy triumphs. In the Telegram of December 13 one finds the whole program settled: the Hon. D. Harry has called the City Delegates about him and told them what to do; the Hon. Mr. Field has affably “explained” the bills that they are to jam through. If the yap members show any rebellion, the Hon. Mr. Harry will be “invited to address the entire Legislature,” and so woo them swiftly to righteousness. On January 9, in the Municipal Journal, these yaps are given a prophylactic dose of goose grease. They are “quiet, unpretentious, retiring”; they are “conscientious and right-thinking servitors of the people”; they will “compete with the city men to devise constructive legislation for Baltimore”–i. e., the Hon. D. Harry & Co. And on January 10, in the Telegram, victory is announced. Everything is safe, including even the Borough bill. True enough, the Hon. Carville D. Benson has come out against it, and he is “one of the shrewdest and most capable fighters in the Legislature,” but he has met his match and his doom in the Hon. MM. Harry and Field.

Alas, for human hopes! Something slipped! Something dropped! The yokels ducked the goose grease and reached for cobblestones. The invitation to “address the entire Legisiature” was torn up, consigned to the fires and expunged from the minutes. The Hon. Sunday-School Field, arriving to put the animals through their tricks, was pursued to the woods. Not only were the chief “city” bills slaughtered, but some that the “city” opposed were passed with a whoop, and apparently for that sole reason. And not only did the yaps do such deviltries, but also some of the City Delegates, and among them such honest lodge brothers as the Hon. G. G. Altfeld. Truly a terrible business! Truly an astounding and flabbergasting betrayal of the true, the good and the beautiful!

But in all evil, as the psalmist hath it, there is good concealed, and in the present case it is to be found in the fact that the Hon. Mr. Field, once recovered from his wounds, will be in better condition than ever before to hoop and roar the hellish iniquities of the Sunpaper, that godless ancient. Anon he will take to the old circuit, the beaten path of urban chatauquas—the City Club, the Women’s Civic League, the neighborhood improvement associations and kaffeeklatsches. Anon he will wring the heart and bulge the eye, with that incredible tale of villainy, that staggering saga of treason and black magic. And anon the Hon. D. Harry will follow him, howling for sympathy and revenge, snorting the gras-tiad, performing with endless passion upon the great blubber-horn, the contralachryophone in E flat minor.

Yet again, one of the sights of Munich is the nightly massmeeting of the Volunteers of Bavaria.

Incredibly immoral remark of the Hon. Albert R. Gallatin:

Flashlight photographs of uplift gatherings, anti-liquor leagues and eugenic societies display a sea of countenances and expressions notable solely for mediocrity and vacancy. * * * Weak minds and feeble bodies unfit them for competitive enterprise, so they call themselves sociologizers and live on the largeness of a few deluded people of great wealth. * * * It is a fine game so long as it lasts, but sooner or later, to their own cost, they learn that the mania for the uplift is a transient phase of an overheated civilization. * * *

Imagine the staff of The Evening Sun at a “dry” banquet! What next, ye gods, what next? The Navy “dry”—and now the literati! “Dry” up the judiciary, and make it three strikes and out!

The Hon. William H. Anderson is the Paderewski of rabble-rousers! Nay, the Beethoven! Nay, the Munich!—Adv.

Rising to a question of personal privilege, I announce my withdrawal from these cloistered shades for a brief space. No; I am not ill. No; I am not worn out by overwork. No; I have not been fired. No; I have not got a better job in New York, or Chicago, or Philadelphia, or anywhere else. No; I am not chased out of town by forward-lookers. No; I am not to be married to a wealthy widow. No; I have no reason to fear the grand jury. No; I have not run out of ideas. No; I have not reached the age limit.

My actual reasons for withdrawing from labor are two in number, to wit: (a) no sane man works if he can help it, and (b) at the moment I can help it. This capacity for escape, of course, is not permanent; if it were, the science of prose would know me no more. But now and then, as one may say, it pulls itself together and is ready for business, and on such occasions the prudent man turns it to his uses. So I depart for a space, and devote myself to the noble art of idling—the noblest of them all. I shall eat heartily, sleep soundly and move at will from place to place–and all without any thought or obligation of work. In brief, I shall inhabit the heaven of all who can’t get into it, and the hell, perhaps, of all who can’t get out of it.

During my absence front these shores this space will be occupied, I hear, by various gentlemen who aspire to save the world with their wisdom and delight it with their graces of style. Bear with them gently and patiently, I prithee. They labor under the delusion that my job is absurdly easy, that my labor is little more than childsplay. It refreshes me to think of the day when the first of these gentlemen is taken from the rear, and with heavy artillery, by the Rev. Dr. Charles M. Levister. Or of the day when the most abstemious of them arises at 7 A. M. with bile in his arteries and no copy on the hook, and sets himself to the composition of a racy article before 10 o’clock.

At the last moment I hear talk of printing Buckle’s “History of Civilization” as a serial. I file a caveat at once; it is a foul scheme to show me up for borrowing without a license.