Depraved

If a preacher should secure metropolitan employment as a taxicab driver and remain so employed for a considerable period, he would undoubtedly witness exhibitions of: drunkenness, misery, wantonness, gaiety, sickness, love. Were he fortunate, he might also witness exhibitions of: murder, robbery, rape. Since preachers sometimes have cause to mention vice, it is well for them to have some knowledge of its nature and consequences. Thus it might be clever for some preacher to perform for a time as the driver of a taxi. This was what the Rev. Thomas H. Whelpley, Manhattan Presbyterian pastor, did.

No sooner had the fact become known than Thomas Whelpley became a human interest story. All Manhattan newssheets gave him stories, while the World paid him to attach his name to a series of articles recounting his experiences. The series told: about a woman who entered his cab saying "Drive me to Hell!", plunged through her biography in luridly improbable terms, drank liquor from a bottle and implied an improper proposal in her admission that she had no money to pay the fare; about two Negresses, who, while sitting in Thomas Whelpley's cab, engaged in a long conversation on their ability to present the appearance of white persons, a conversation which Thomas Whelpley reported verbatim and in extenso; about a member of his former congregation who ducked into a hotel with a "perfumed young woman"; about a female who cried "Turn around, Turn around! Don't you hear? Go back. Damned if she'll get him! He's mine."

It is possible that Thomas Whelpley experienced the episodes which he described. But to many a newspaperman it seemed clear that in the present debauch of "ghostwriting" a depraved press had gone so far as to persuade a preacher to join the ranks of sporting characters and society women who lie for money.