Baltimore Evening Sun (21 October 1911): 6.

Only 1,308 days more! So they say! So they say!

The Voice of the People, as the balmy winds of Indian summer waft it in:

Whatever could have became of them boomers? Don’t you gettin’ no ideer that you can ever beat the organization. ——— Contributions to the lexicon of American synonyms for “married”:

Snared Spliced Convicted Conquered Noosed Electrocuted

The tearful advertisement of the Hon. Robert H. Carr, it appears, was refused by The Sun and The Evening Sun. An effective answer to the scandalous rumor that I lately bought both papers. If I really owned them, such contributions would be received with great hospitality, not only because the sale of space at 25 cents a line would delight me, but also because the accusations themselves would flatter me. A newspaper which arouses the desperate rages of such fellows as those behind the Hon. Mr. Carr—a newspaper upon which, when the time comes to battle for life, they concentrate their artillery—is a newspaper which needs no other certificate of influence and character. Such gladiators do not wrestle with mere spooks. When they begin killing they try to kill their most dangerous enemy first.

The advertisement was refused, I am told, not because it attacked The Sun, but because it attacked an individual connected with The Sun. A technical point of etiquette, or morals, and thus over my head. An attack upon a newspaper is almost inevitably an attack upon some individual connected with it. But what are the odds? The question before the house is whether the newspaper is right or wrong. Time alone can answer. Meanwhile the more vicious and venomous the attack, the more the interest of the public will be amused, and the more eagerly it will wait for that answer.

The same sort of attack was made in the spring. The Hon. James Harry Preston, that brave creature, went about our fair city complaining that there was a newspaper conspiracy on foot to ruin him. Many sympathetic persons, observing the tears trickling down his heaving chest, began to weep, too. He polled enough votes to give a color of plausibility to the announcement that he was elected. But who’s looney now? The newspapers which warned the voters against him, or the voters who were convinced by his tears? He has been in office five months. Has his administration borne out or refuted the newspaper advance notices?

Talk of newspaper conspiracies is often heard. It issues incessantly from the glottises of bad actors, snide politicians, frauds of all sorts. The only genuine newspaper conspiracy, believe me, is the conspiracy to sell papers. And the only sure way to make that conspiracy successful is to play the game straight, to tell the truth, to plug along in the narrow road. The public, said some forgotten sage, is an ass. But not continuously, not eternally. Now and then a disconcerting hiatus appears in its asininity. It stops to think things over. And whenever it so stops to think things over, it reaches the lamentable conclusion that, when a choice has to be made between an independent newspaper and a political camorra, the safer course is to trust the newspaper.

Remark of the Hon. William Shepard Bryan, Jr.:

Some one once said that a gentleman always kept his implied obligations.

Whereby it appears to all men that the super-Mahon is an undoubted gentleman.

The betting odds offered in the downtown kaifs, corrected to 12 o’clock meridian today:

Four to one that Gorman will carry the city. Two to one that Gorman will carry the State. Three to one that Carr will carry the city. Ten to one that nothing won’t never come outen them indictments.

Wanted: Recruits for a relief committee to go to the relief of the Citizens’ Relief Committee.

After all the Royal Family is probably in favor of the commission plan—so long as the commissions are liberal.

J. Albert Hughes! J. Albert J. Hughes! The goosebone says you’re bound to lose!

Proverbial philosophy of the merry fellows who now govern us:

A vote in the box is worth two in the returns. Let us count the ballets of a city and we care not who bawls for reform. A good precinct needs no stuffing.

From weepers and gnashers of teeth, from appeals for sympathy and bawling in the market-place—kind fates, deliver us!