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"God's Country" As Viewed By An
Educator To the Editor or The Evening Sun—Sir: Whether Mr. Mencken's article was timely and whether it will help your Eastern Shore circulation" and establish a better relationship between Baltimore and the counties are questions that The Evening Sun can best answer.
But one thing that the Eastern Shore sentimentalists didn't seem to realize is that Mr. Mencken's article was truthful.
Two years ago I was engaged in educational research in Maryland. The results of the survey of the Eastern Shore were appalling.
The Eastern Shore schools (primary) are considered to have the lowest curriculum of any county of any State along the Atlantic Seaboard. The use of English and Eastern Shore accent is recognized to be the most illiterate speech in the country except the Swedes of Minnesota (who never claim to be Americans, anyway), and the people of the mountain regions of the South, who really have an excuse.
Some seventy-three per cent, of the inmates of the State institutions for the insane are natives of the Eastern Shore.
In the last ten years there have been more petitions filed in court for the support of illegitimate^ children on the Eastern Shore than in all the other counties of Maryland or the city of Baltimore.
In the thirty-two States I have worked in I have never encountered the lack of sanitary living conditions or poverty that I encountered on the Eastern Shore.
Figures don't lie and the above statistics are available so that the only fight a few Eastern Shore sentimentalists have with H. L. Mencken is his colossal nerve in telling them the truth about their "God'i country." E. M. Willet, Ph. D.
New York City, Dec. 12.
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