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What a prize lyncher Henry would make, particularly gifted as he is for staying in I the background and stirring the other fel-jlow on to desperate deeds (like boycotting The Sun, for instance).
If this man ever gets saved, what a Billy Sunday he would make!
The old "Hen" still knows how to scratch in the dunghill for the dollar. Anybody who will take the time to rummage through old Noah Webster's rubbish heap for stuff with which to adorn his high-browish righteousness, take a good drink of "bootleg" and start in to "smear" his neighbors can win more attention and coin more coin than a whole Sermon on the Mount over a world-wide "hook-up." You see, when judged against the background of our idealistic ways our neighbors are all such a lot of impossible morons—mental. moral and spiritual—they need a good "cussin'," and we are perfectly willing to pay such a good "cusser" as Henry good money to do it.
For culture, my dear brethren, per Henry's brand is simply the ability to 'cuss", without using regular "swear words," to libel everybody in general and nobody in particular (thus dodging the courts), and to get a spell of perfectly human biliousness passed off for pure righteousness and collect the "kale" for it. And anybody who loves Methodist preachers, prohibition, the Man and an old-fashioned revival meeting the ardent way Henry does is apt to have a spell of biliousness most any time these days. Which leads me to hope that the Mencken brand of "larnin" and "kultur" will not become epidemic over here on the Eastern Shore. Now, we may, "once in a blue moon," lynch a poor Negro; but, then, we would give ourselves to the daily diversion of lynching each other. George F. Newton.
Preston, Md., Dec. 11.
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