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I

ON BEING A FREE LANCE

A SATURNALIA OF BUNK

WHY NOT A permanent organization in Baltimore for warring upon stupidity, flapdoodle and buncombe? The fakes and the fanatics, the boneheads and the balderdashians, who swarm here as in few other cities of Christendom, have scores and scores of clubs and unions, and these clubs and unions pour a constant stream of nonsense into the public ear. Pick up a newspaper any day and you will quickly see that nine-tenths of the proposals and propositions before the people are frankly and unequivocally ridiculous. On the one hand, the City Council proposes to build a $2,000,000 tunnel under the harbor at a place where there is not enough business to support a single ferry-boat. On the other hand, the Lord’s Day Alliance¹ proposes to make the Baltimore Sunday even more horrible than it is. On the third hand, as it were, the Hon. Mahoni Amicus strikes affecting attitudes in the spotlight, a “martyr” to newspaper “conspiracy.” On the fourth hand, various camorras of ignoranti come forward with absurd “proofs” that the Pasteur vaccine will not cure hydrophobia. On the fifth hand, some tinpot “improvement” association—what hatcheries of prominent Baltimoreans those parochial parliaments are!—bawls loudly for a new park where none is needed. On the sixth hand, the Health Department sophisticates the mortality returns and claims praise for the deed. On the seventh hand, a half dozen booming bureaux fight one another, announce a multitude of grandiose plans—and never carry one of them out. On the eighth hand, Jake Hook and the Super-Mahon denounce the merit system on the ground that it would force them to employ niggero clerks. On the ninth hand, the common people are anæsthetized by a microscopic lowering of the tax rate and then plundered of their savings by a staggering increase in water rents and special assessments. On the tenth hand, public commissions discuss interminably the paving of streets—and no streets are paved. On the eleventh hand, the improvement of the water supply is constantly and tediously debated—and the water remains putrid and poisonous. And on the twelfth hand (to make an end of this centimanual enumeration), political rabble-rousers burst eternally with schemes for saving money, and yet out of every dollar paid in taxes, either to city or to State, fully 50 cents are wasted, lost, misspent, grafted or stolen.

An endless saturnalia of bunk, of bluff, of stupidity, of insincerity, of false virtue, of nonsense, of pretense, of sophistry, of parology, of bamboozlement, of actorial posturing, of strident wind music, of empty words—even, at times, of downright fraud. If the City Council is not flinging its legs about in some new debauch of clowning, then some faction or other of the boomers is launching a new and extra-preposterous scheme for “saving” the town from imaginary disaster, or some new and useless board is being created by the Legislature, or some new and ridiculous campaign for chemical purity is being started by snooping Puritans, or in some other way, always noisy, usually three-fourths silly, the peace, dignity and well-being of intelligent men are being invaded.

Certainly Baltimore must have a few citizens who do not fall for all or any of this buncombe—who can tell a hawk from a handsaw without a helping diagram—who have no faith in boomery, no faith in militant morality, no faith in political mountebankery—who believe that a fact is eternally a fact, and that all the yowling of a thousand gullets cannot change it—who possess, in brief, the faculty of elementary reasoning, of ordinary logic, and exercise it unemotionally, even while the yells resound and the red fire burns and the smell of punk² is in the air. I do not say that there are many such men in Baltimore. In our population, as everyone knows, there is an abnormally large proportion of ciphers—darkies, foreigners, invading yokels, professional loafers and so on. And despite the presence of excellent educational opportunities, the educated man, in the true sense of the term, is still a rarity in the classes above—so much a rarity, indeed, that he exhales a smell of sorcery, and it is always possible for political bawlers to rouse the rabble against him. Again our so-called polite society is shoddy and ignorant: its influence, if it has any influence at all, is frankly on the side of buncombe. And the measure of our “leading” lawyers and “prominent” business men is revealed by the acts and pronunciamentoes of the grotesque organizations which represent them.

But for all this, Baltimore still has its faction of intelligent, unemotional, fully adult men—not a large faction, true enough, but still a faction, and one influential enough, if it would but speak in one voice, to knock out, or at least cripple, most of the wizards whose fallacies now reach the common people as wisdom. A few such men found their way, I suppose by accident, into the recent Red Cross Committee of chartermakers: you will see their hand in the demand that the City Council, that incurable and intolerable evil, that worst and costliest of pests, be destroyed root and branch. And there are others, perhaps a thousand all told—men who are capable of ordinary ratiocination—who don’t intrigue for political jobs, who have no desire for the applause of numbskulls, who see the truth with reasonable clarity and can afford to tell it—men, in brief, who approximate, more or less roughly, to the intelligence, or at least to the courage and degree of civilization, of such a man as the late Richard M. Venable.

Why are such men heard from in Baltimore so seldom? Why don’t they rise up more often and haul down the ballyho men who try to sell us cure-alls? Why are they silent, knowing the truth, when balderdash in mountainous bales is being unloaded upon the town? Why, in a word, don’t they form a posse comitatus, launch a counter-reformation, and wage a persistent and useful war upon all that riot of snide politics, of bluff and bluster, of anemonic and anemic boomery, of unintelligent agitation, of grab and guff, of puerility and piffle which now assaults and pesters every Baltimorean, keeps the city in a barbarous wallow and makes it laughable in the sight of all creation? [30 December 1911]

THE CENSORIOUS MENCKEN

From an earnest but ungrammatical essay by the Hon. Thomas G. Boggs in the current issue of the Baltimoreische Blaetter, the monthly comic paper of the Honorary Pallbearers:

There are critics and critics. Honest, constructive criticism by able and earnest persons is valuable. The object and service of such tend to betterment, for which every human and communities of humans should and do, as a general thing, strive for. But the critic, or rather he who criticizes in flippant, reckless and even smart Aleck manner, for fun and personal gratification, who offers no remedies for that with which he may justly find fault, is a pusillanimous pest and a damage to his community. We have in Baltimore, connected, unfortunately, with one of our newspapers, such a one. He is given a latitude that is surprising—far beyond the editorial privileges in the same paper. We are told that he writes certain editorials which praise Baltimore and its people, while on the same page, over his own signature, he abuses the city and those who are endeavoring in an unselfish manner, to benefit the community.

Reducing these amazing snarls of verbiage to simple English, one discovers that they set forth two propositions, to wit:

1. That I engage in loathsome critical vivisections wantonly, and with no intelligible plan of improvement in mind.

2. That I am two-faced, or rather two-handed, writing anonymous eulogies of Baltimore with one hand and signed attacks on Baltimore with the other.

Such are the allegations of the Hon. Thomas G. Boggs, editor of the Baltimoreische Blaetter and chairman of the standing committee on boggus statistics. My answer thereto may be divided into two asseverations, viz:

1. I deny absolutely that I have ever, at any time since the year 1900, written a single line anonymously, for THE EVENING SUN or any other publication, which has conflicted, in any essential, with any article bearing my signature.

2. I deny absolutely, and with a staggering emission of oaths, that I have ever written a single paragraph about the needs and defects of Baltimore which has not revealed on its face, or by plain implication, a definite and intelligible plan of improvement.

But what plan of improvement? A very simple and workable plan. A plan, in brief, involving a rising of the civilized and intelligent people of this town against buncombe and balderdash, fake and fraud, sophistry and salve-spreading—against the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association and its gaseous resolutions, its oblique attacks upon good government, its boggus statistics—against all the other camorras of boomers, with their childish rivalries and back-bitings, their idle blassmusik and windjamming, their incessant manufacture of Prominent Baltimoreans—against all the militant moralists who seek to make life in Baltimore as dull and depressing as life in the House of Correction—against the Old-Fashioned Administration, its rabble-rousers and frauds, its chicaneries and indecencies—against that low and revolting form of journalism which apologizes for such things and encourages such things—against all that saturnalia of bluff and bluster, of quackery in business and politics, of disingenuousuess and stupidity, of noise and nonsense, of slobbler-gobble and rumble-bumble, of false starts and false pretenses, of maudlin bawling and tin-horn magic, of rotten respectability and stuffed dignity, which makes every true Baltimorean ashamed, at times, of his city, and honestly fearful, at other times, of its future.

I myself, my dear Tom, am a Baltimorean—a Baltimorean of the third generation, born here, living here in great contentment, and hopeful of finding a quiet resting-place, along about 1975 or 1980, in Loudon Park.³ I have the greatest faith in Baltimore—and not only in the future of Baltimore, but also in its present. The one thing we suffer from, at the moment, is a plague of bad advisers, of moral, political and economic charlatans. On the one hand we are besought, with loud yells, to make improvements which would not be improvements at all; on the other hand, we are taught that the best way to deal with certain pressing evils is to deny them. Under the first heading fall most of the plans of the so-called boomers; under the second heading, to cite but one example, falls the joint effort of the Health Department and Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association to sophisticate the mortality returns.

Such enterprises, I believe, are dangerous. It is dangerous to spread the crazy notion that commercial prosperity is the only measure of a city’s progress, and it is dangerous to preach the doctrine that evils are best dealt with by denying them. But despite all this false teaching, despite all this quackery and flapdoodle, this mountebankery and mendacity, this rhetoric and rottenness, Baltimore wobbles along. We Baltimoreans get enough to eat; we live in decent houses; we are pretty well satisfied with our comfortable old town. And if, from baffled boomers, comes anon the allegation that we are stupid, that we are slow to comprehend, that we do not rise promptly to ideas, then we may answer quite safely, in defense of our intelligence, that we still have sense enough to see the essential hollowness and insincerity, the guff and gabble, the buncombe and balderdash of boomery. [24 January 1912]

THE VIRTUE OF HOWLING

From an editorial in the Baltimore Southern Methodist entitled “With Our Compliments to the Free Lance” and showing the suave literary style of the Rev. Dr. C. D. Harris:

We must confess we cannot understand his caustic strictures upon men of this community of the highest integrity and character. Must men who are actively interested in the moral betterment of the city and State be held up to ridicule and scorn?

The objection of a critic who deserves respect—but is he quite fair? I question it. When a man comes before a community with a new pill for the cure of its malaises, and particularly when he proposes to administer it by force of arms, the thing for the community to determine is not whether the man himself is pious and honest, but whether the pill will actually cure. If the probabilities are all against it, then it is the duty of every good citizen to denounce the quack, and that duty increases in direct ratio to the citizen’s opportunities. I have no apologies to offer for howling from my own private stump. I am paid to howl; I enjoy howling; it makes me feel virtuous to howl.

The fact that a quack happens to be respectable is no defense of his quackery. The more respectable he is, the more dangerous he is. If the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte were an obscure shyster, his public advocacy of pharisaical and unenforceable laws would be of no consequence. But it so happens that he is a man of the highest position and dignity, the bearer of a great name, a powerful maker of public opinion, and therefore his errors are of very serious consequence indeed. When he tries to enforce them by the mere weight of his authority, disdaining all honest opposition and grossly libeling its spokesmen, it is an agreeable business to show that vastly weightier authority is ranged against him. And when he tries to prevail by the sheer violence of his whoops, then it is a pious act to whoop even louder.

No word of abuse has ever been printed in this place against any man who sought to persuade people to his honest opinion by fair and honest argument. But there is a tremendous difference between honest persuasion and violent and ill-natured browbeating, and that difference I shall continue to point out from time to time. The objection to the moralists whom the Rev. Dr. Harris defends is not only that they are wrong, but also and more especially that they are intolerant, pharisaical, cruel, ignorant, vindictive, vituperative and disingenuous. In brief, they try to overcome their opponents, not by proving them in error, but by calling them scoundrels. That is a fault so discreditable that it wipes out all the credit of their holy zeal. It is a fault that their pastors should beat out of them with clubs. They should be taught manners before ever they are allowed to teach the rest of us morals.

I give so much space to the Rev. Dr. Harris’ accusation because I regard him as an honest man, and hence one among many. What is more, he is a sinner and thus my brother. I myself once caught him in sin, and he frankly admitted it. This lifts him above all suspicion of personal interest. I hold no brief against any moralist save the bogus archangel, the lofty sniffer, the manhater, the pharisee, the bichloride tablet. Let me call on the rev. gent., then, for the name of one gentleman, not obviously of that fair brotherhood, whom I have ever attacked unjustly, and to whom I have ever shown discourtesy. Let him produce one lone honest moralist with authentic wounds. [17 October 1913]

BEING ON THE LOSING SIDE

Friendly caution and summons of an anonymous contributor to the Letter Column:

Sir Lancelot, don’t you know you’re on the losing side? Can’t you discern the signs of the times?

Well, suppose I am? Suppose I can? What of it? Is there any special virtue in being on the winning side? If so, let’s hear it. Personally, I have always found it a great deal more exciting to lose than to win, and what is more, a great deal more soothing to the soul. Imagine a man winning with the mob behind him, or, say, the City Council, or the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or the salacious old deacons of the Anti-Saloon League!⁴ The immediate fruits of victory, true enough, would be his. He would be applauded, he would be esteemed, perhaps he would even get a good job. But consider the damage to his self-respect, the staggering psychic insult! How he would blush when he shaved in the morning—and looked into his mirror!

But what good is accomplished by combating the irresistible, the inevitable? For example, what good is accomplished by opposing prohibition, which is bound to triumph in Maryland within five years, and perhaps within two years? The answer is as simple as can be: no good is accomplished. Utilitarianism sees the enterprise as wasteful and vain, and hence as immoral. But while utilitarianism thus denounces it, hedonism approves it. That is to say, its objective uselessness is outweighed by its subjective pleasantness. Herein lies the beauty of philosophy: it is so full of contradictions that it affords excuse for every imaginable immorality. And herein lies the charm of life: that one man’s poison is another man’s meat.

Just why it is so all-fired agreeable to object to what the great bulk of “right-thinking” men regard as nice I do not profess to determine with accuracy. My own theory is that the feeling is based upon sound logical and psychological grounds: that the pursuit of the truth is inherently pleasant, and that the pursuit of the truth necessarily involves a conflict with the majority of men, who view it, at best, with suspicion, and at worst, with the most savage hostility. Some one has put the fact into a platitude: What everyone believes is never true. It was voiced by Paul in his famous saying, The truth shall make you free⁵—i. e., shall release you from membership in the stupid and credulous mob.

All belief in the intelligence of the mob—which is to say, all democracy—is based upon the erroneous assumption that logic is instinctive in man, just as lying and theft are instinctive. Nothing could be more ridiculously untrue. The fact is that logic is one of the youngest of the arts, and that relatively few men ever attain to any facility in its practice, even after the most painstaking instruction. Such rare men, I believe, tend to increase just as the men who can read and write tend to increase, but the vast majority still labor under a congenital unfitness or incapacity. These inept ones, whose logical fingers are all thumbs, run the United States today. They believe that Friday is an unlucky day, that Peruna⁶ will cure catarrh, that a cat has nine lives, that one American militiaman would be a fair match for 10 Germans or 20 Frenchmen, that all rich men are rogues ipso facto and that universal human appetites may be obliterated by a simple legislative fiat. They venerate Theodore Roosevelt as the male Jane Addams, and Jane Addams as the female Roosevelt, and both as profound and revolutionary thinkers.

One of the minor errors we make in considering the logical faculty is that of confusing it with mere education. The two things, of course, are wholly distinct, and in some sense even antagonistic. A man may have a mind richly stored with facts, and yet at the same time he may fall into error in the most elementary reasoning processes. I offer as an example a distinguished member of the Johns Hopkins faculty, whose name and chair I charitably suppress. This gentleman, with the best intentions in the world, once composed a pamphlet that has since been widely circulated by interested persons. It covers but a few pages, but in those few pages the whole science of logic is reduced to madness. The learned professor jumps through syllogisms with the abandon of a hunter leaping a hedge. It would be impossible to imagine a wilder debauch of faulty premises and unwarranted conclusions. And yet the thing was composed seriously, and is accepted seriously by 99 readers out of every 100 today.

When we come to men less trained to purely intellectual processes, by reason, perhaps, of a preoccupation with emotional and hence unreasonable matters, we find even worse examples, if worse be possible, of logical burlesque and buffoonery. At the risk of seeming to push a point too hard, I cite again the astounding chain of reasoning whereby the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte has established, to his own satisfaction, that all men who oppose the hounding of miserable prostitutes are either frequenters of their studios or friends of their prosperity. This chain of reasoning, it may be said at once, has convinced not only the Hon. Mr. Bonaparte himself, but also many other persons. And yet, at bottom, it is not only at war with the easily demonstrable facts, but also inherently unsound and ridiculous. Here we have a former Attorney-General of the United States—i. e., a recognized leader in a profession based upon logic—backing logic into a corner and beating it to death.

And if there be any further desire to seek clinical material, and no objection is made to visiting the free wards wherein the lowly fight for life, I offer this column gladly. Herein one observes full oft that even an amateur, who ordinarily loves the art he practices, may maul it quite as mercilessly as a professional, who ordinarily hates it. Two or three weeks ago some kind gentleman informed the Letter Column that he had found no less than six separate logical absurdities in my compositions in one week. Obviously a blind man—or a humanitarian. My real score must be well over six a day, with a dozen on Blue Mondays. [6 February 1914]

MENCKEN TAKES A VACATION

Au revoir, dear hearts! Auf wiedersehen! In this place, during my absence in the service of the Kaiser, various sophists and wordmongers will purl and cavort. I beseech you to hear and bear their rumble-bumble with patience; I shall return anon, and once more an orthodox and laudable doctrine will be on tap. I need not remind you how many misguided and fatuous persons there are in this town, State, republic, hemisphere and world. You and I are fortunate in that we are not to be reckoned among them. Whatever we believe is true, and in most cases, self-evident. We are not deceived by the mere appearance of things. We do not suffer ourselves to be stampeded by the sough and burble of empty words. We never make mistakes. What, never? Well, hardly ever.

Nevertheless, let us not take too much flattering unction to our souls. It is not because of any merit of our own, but simply by the providence of God, that we are not such boobs and suckers as other men are. How thick, after all, is the partition which separates us from the Socialists, the Bryanistas, the uplifters, the peruna-swallowers, the Christian Scientists, the believers in palmistry and international peace, the osteopaths and osseocaputs?⁷ Not more than an eighth of an inch. A slight shove in early youth and we would have burst through it, and so come to manhood as forward-lookers and right-thinkers. Think how narrow the escape! And then give thanks for it in all humility of spirit.

Furthermore, let us not underestimate these lowly brothers, for they, too, serve their benign uses in the world, and have human needs and feelings. Even a Socialist, for all his stupidity, may yet be a very respectable specimen of a man. He may labor diligently at some necessary, though perhaps ignoble, trade, art or profession—for example, vest-cutting, journalism or beer-bottling. His wife may love him, and even venerate him. His children may look up to him as to a pillar of wisdom. He may be esteemed in his submerged circle for qualities which do credit to his heart however they may expose and denounce his head. He may go, in the end, to Heaven, and shine the shoes of Karl Marx for all eternity. Such a man is not to be sniffed at. He may be foolish, but he is surely not quite degraded.

So with all other uplifters and press agents of the millennium. You and I know, true enough, that they are bughouse, but let us not fall into the error of assuming that they are therefore wholly devoid of merit. Within his narrow sphere, within the circumscribed and unyielding circle of his capital ivory, the uplifter may even be faintly creditable to the human race, just as an industrious peasant may be creditable, or even an Englishman. I know, in fact, a number of such uplifters. They approach a capacity for human reason very closely; they are at least anthropoid; mammals without a doubt, they bring forth their young alive, and their ideas in passable English. I hope I am not one to sneer at these worthy creatures. A few seidels of authentic Pilsner would convert the best of them into excellent second-rate men.

Even Sunday-school superintendents, I dare say, are occasionally full of virtue, though the impression to the contrary seems to be widespread and ineradicable. Personally I do not share in the common suspicion of them. I am willing to admit, of course, that their vulnerability to temptation is greater than that of bartenders, and that more of them thus go wrong, but perhaps this is only because they are exposed to greater temptations—which is also the case, I suppose, with working girls. The bartender, let it be remembered, is protected by the cash register, a device which interposes such obstacles to his cupidity that it must often save him when he would otherwise sneak a yellowback.⁸ The Sunday-school superintendent enjoys the protection of no such checks and balances. Widow ladies with insurance money to invest continue to place it in his hands; dealers in Mexican mine stock never overlook him; many women fall in love with him. Is it any wonder that he so often ends as a fugitive from justice, a price upon his head?

I did not start out, however, to defend Sunday-school superintendents, but to protest gently against a too contemptuous view of the boneheads of the world. Secure behind the ramparts of our superior sagacity, let us look down upon them, gents, with kindly feeling and genuine brotherliness. They do their darndest with their meager machinery and angels could do no more. It is surely nothing against them that their skulls are somewhat tight, and so give little play to the peristaltic action of their pituitary bodies. You and I, for all our amazing acumen, would be in the same boat if some footpad were to sneak up behind us when we were in our cups, and dent our trapeziuses with a blunt weapon. In brief, our infallibility resides chiefly in a purely physical accident, or, at any rate, in a physical immunity, and so we should be no more uppish about it than we are about our bulk or our loveliness. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Some are born virtuous and some are born cunning. [4 January 1915]

MENCKEN ATTACKED

The Hon. John Stonewall J. Healy’s pious ranting in today’s Forum is pathetically typical of the new “Americanism”—that fantastic compound of cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing. It is a first principle of this tin-pot “Americanism” that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil; it is a second principle that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift! Because I presume to believe, along with such men as Prof. Drs. John W. Burgess, William M. Sloane, Herbert C. Sanborn and Henry Wood, that Germany is right in this war and England wrong, I am a foe to the true, the good and the beautiful. Because I presume to argue, along with the Hon. William J. Stone, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States Senate, that the Lusitania was a belligerent ship and that her passengers knowingly risked their lives in boarding her, I commit an offense against the United States. And because the Editor of THE EVENING SUN, despite his open partiality for the Allies, is still fair enough and courageous enough to let me present my contrary views in this place, he is a low scoundrel, selling his honor for a few miserable dollars.

What puerile buncombe! What a vain making of faces! What a deadly exposure of the true dignity and manliness of the new “Americanism,” by Judge Lynch out of Chautauqua! And how beautifully the Hon. Mr. Healy, with his virtuous bluster and empty charges, serves as an exponent and example of it! Consider his logic: THE EVENING SUN, eager for profit, outrages and alienates the overwhelming majority of its readers in order to tickle a small minority! What a syllogism is here, Messieurs! What an Aristotle performs upon the tragic bassoon! And consider again his plain allegation that I have “gloated over the suffering” of the Lusitania victims (When? Where?) and his allegation that I have denounced Dr. Wilson “in language so foul and indecent that at times it was unfit for publication in a decent family journal” (Examples, I prithee!), and his allegation that I am employed “for the special purpose” of signing my name to “the inspired and prepared stuff sent out by the German propagandists” (Am I, then, incapable of writing my stuff myself?), and his allegation that “the German papers published in this country are subsidized by the German Government” (Why subsidize them? How long would they last if they opposed Germany?). What ludicrous yawping, indeed! What a feeble and childish rattling!

I do not offer the Hon. Mr. Healy the affront of assuming that he actually believes these allegations to be true. On the contrary, I assume that he knows very well that they are false. That he makes them at all is sufficient evidence of the lamentable state of mind into which he has fallen, and with him a vast number of other such highfalutin’ and hysterical moralists. England has long rung with these frenzied charges and hollow threats; they are now heard fortissimo in the United States. Let the Hon. Mr. Healy cast his eye toward the Germans, observing them studiously through his pious tears. He will find that they are not moralizing, but fighting; that they make steady progress against the enormous hordes of their foes; that they draw tighter and tighter the rope around John Bull’s neck; that they face the future resolutely, bravely, confidently, paying no heed to the moral slobber-gobble of their enemies, whether open or disguised. Let him ask himself which race is better fitted to prevail in the world—the Germans with their homeric strength and daring, or the English with their white livers and their womanish screams for help.

As for the hon. gentleman’s impatience with my own heterodoxy, I regret that I can offer him no assurances of reform. Strange as it may seem to him, I am a good American (only partly, by the way, of German blood) and eager to serve my country. Unfitted by fastidious prejudices for that petty job-seeking which has been the hon. gentleman’s avenue of service, I devote myself to combating what appear to me to be elements of decay in the national philosophy and the national character. I believe that the American people would be a stronger and more respectable race if they could get rid of the intellectual dishonesty and slimy hypocrisy that they have inherited from England, and take on something of the German’s respect for the eternal and immovable facts. To the promotion of this transformation I shall devote the time intervening between the present moment and my inevitable arrival at Loudon Park. And if not in this place, then in some other place. [12 May 1915]