During the investigation of Chief Kennedy one witness testified to
something that ought to make it hot for the chief. When men stoop to do
the things that Mr. Chapin testified to, an outraged public sentiment
has got to step in. Mr. Chapin testified--and he is a man whose word
is as good as our note--he said he met Kennedy in a street car, and his
breath smelled of limburg cheese. That is enough. Carry his remains out.
Any man who will appear in a public place, among folks, with his breath
smelling of limburg cheese, has got his opinion of us. It is simply
damnable. We can see how a man who likes limburg cheese is liable,
though he may have sworn off, to return to the mustard cup, and after
the first taste, fill his skin full of cheese, arguing that one may as
well die for an old sheep as a lamb.
It is a well known fact, agreed to by all scientists, that a single
mouthful' will tarnish an otherwise virtuous breath as much as a whole
cheese. One mouthful of cheese leads on to another, and we are prepared
to believe that if the chief smelled of cheese at all, he was full of
it.
Men cannot be too careful of cheese. If a man feels that he is going to
commit the dastardly act of eating limburg cheese, he has time to go out
to a glue factory, or a slaughter house, or the house of correction, or
some other place whose offense is rank.
The desire to eat cheese does not come upon a man suddenly, like the
desire to take a drink, or stand off a creditor, and he is not taken
possession of by the demon of appetite and pulled to the nearest saloon
by a forty horse power devil, as is the man who has the jim jams.
The cheese does its work more quietly. It whispers to him about 11
o'clock a. m., and says there is nothing like cheese. He stands it off,
and again in the afternoon the cheese takes possession of him and leads
him on step by step, by green fields, and yet he does not fall. But
about 9 o'clock p. m. the air seems full of cheese, and he smells it
wherever he goes, and finally, after resisting for ten hours, he goes
and orders a cheese sandwich.
Now, when the feeling first comes on, and he shuts his eyes and imagines
he sees limburg cheese, if the victim would go and buy a slice and go
away out in the country, by the fertilizer factory, he could eat his
cheese and no one but the workmen in the fertilizer factory could
complain. That is what ought to be done when a man is addicted to
cheese.
But this chief of police has stood up in the face of public opinion,
eaten limburg cheese with brazen effrontery that would do credit to a
lawyer, and has gone into a public conveyance, breathing pestilence and
cheese. There is no law on our statute books that is adequate to punish
a man who will thus trample upon the usages of society.
However, the conviction of Kennedy of eating limburg cheese will be the
means of acquitting him of the other charge, that of conversing with a
lewd woman. We doubt if there is a lewd woman, though she be terribly
lewd, who would allow a man to come within several blocks of her who had
been eating that deceased cheese.
If we were in Kennedy's place we would admit the cheese, and then bring
ten thousand women to swear whether they would remain in the same room
with a man who had been eating that cheese. There are men who _do_
eat cheese, bad men, the wicked classes, who go into the presence of
females, but that is one thing which causes so many suicides among the
poor fallen girls. When we hear that another naughty but nice looking
girl has been filling her skin full of paregoric and is standing off
a doctor with a stomach pump, we instinctively feel as though some man
with a smell of cheese about his garments had been paying attention to
her, and she had become desperate.
If they discharge the chief on that cheese testimony it will be a lesson
to all men hereafter.