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oi nis superiors.
Think of the lamentable state of Mr. Mencken the Moralizer who rids himself of a long-standing mental vacuum by stuffing his mind with envy, hatred, malice, and all unchar-itableness! I am surprised by his vicious diatribe at the Methodist preachers of this region. No more sturdy defenders of the faith, no more assiduous and self-sacrificing pastors, no more blessed and successful shepherds of the flock can be found anywhere; certainly not in Baltimore, which is only kept from sinking into the uttermost degradation of bestiality by laws which prohibit certain practices and vocations on Sunday— most of which prohibitions I seriously i doubt if Mr. Mencken the Moralizer himself observes.
Men easily credit what they wish to believe, and evidently every trifling action and attribute of the Eastern Shore citizen has been magnified by our writer into evil purpose and inherent wickedness. Despite his generous pointing out of so many of our non-existent mistakes we shall continue to till our farms, and ply our trades, and pay our bills, to educate our children and to bring them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. We shall be friendly with our neighbors, strive to inculcate justice and morality, be sure to attend Divine service each Sunday, and probably many of us will pray that Mr. Mencken the Moralizer may lose his spirit of injustice, dispense with his vituperative tongue, and so live and learn that he may at length be at peace and amity with all mankind.
If Mr. Mencken is sincere in his "call for volunteers" to educate our people, let me advise him not to offer his own services. For the educative process demands a teacher who can be respected, revered, loved, and the one who gets results does not begin by calling his pupils "morons," "poor white trash," "poltroons" and clowns.
I read Mr. Mencken's article through twice and I failed to find one single constructive suggestion, nothing but stimulation of racial hatreds, stirring up of enmity between man and man, and airing of his peculiar notions. Nothing seems to have been
self by reading over again his dissertation in The Evening Sun and exclaiming in the words of Juvenal Sat. III. 1; 230,
"And sure in any corner we can get To call one lizard ours is something yet."
This experience may be needful, for just now Mr. Mencken the Moralizer is a cross between the goody-goody and the salt of the earth, a man who refers all things to himself, and so thrusts himself into the center of the world as if all lines should meet in him and his fortunes (Bacon).
Mr. Mencken cannot escape his share in the catastrophe. It is men of his stamp—who think, speak and write in the irresponsible strain that characterizes his work—who have given Baltimoreans a wrong idea as to the residents of the Eastern Shore. There are scores of his fellow citizens who in days agone have come to Maryland's great Ocean resort in our county to pass the summer months, many of whom have bought or built cottages at Ocean City, not alone because of the bracing air, the clean white sands, the glorious expanse of the grand old ocean, but because they have learned to like and love the Godfearing, manly men, the tenderhearted, obliging women of this vicinity, and Mr. Mencken the Moralizer cannot force them to believe his strictures upon such people justified.
I declare the unalterable conviction of cur people that the sparks which led to the explosion were dropped on the train of powder by the Labor Defense League of Baltimore, and the first sign of danger followed the braggart mouthings of its attorney Bernard Ades. Snow Hill is not so far from Salisbury that the repercussion of events in the one cannot reach the other and have its due effect. The animus of the Lee murder was a question of wages, the same as in the Williams murder. And the inspiration in the latter case was the apparent success of the efforts of the Labor Defense League to delay the trial and obtain a miscarriage of justice.
When Lawyer Ades came to Snow
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