Baltimore Evening Sun (1 November 1911): 6.

Only 1,298 days more! Be patient, dear hearts! Few are legislated out of office—and none resign.

From the super-Mahon’s harangue to the Tenth Legion last night:

The press attacked me, but I have not answered in my defense, nor do I purpose to do so.

A sob, of course, is not an answer—but, nevertheless, it answered in the spring.

Another great saying from that masterful oration:

If you give the advertisements, you get the editorial.

Is this a confession? If so, what will the other party to the contract say of such disconcerting frankness?

The furious and copious cannonading of the Hon. Roger W. Cull has smashed all the objects of vertu and brought down all the plaster casts and framed testimonials in The Evening Sun office, and in consequence the paper is being composed today in a nearby kaif. Under such circumstances it is clearly impossible to reply with projectiles suitably primed and warmed. But while the wreckers exhume the carcass of extinct editorial writers and the surgeons spray the survivors with balsam, an opportunity at least offers to say a few modest and quavering words.

The Hon. Arthur Pue Gorman, Jr., according to the Hon. Mr. Call, was “made the Gubernatorial candidate of the organization” by the Hon. John J. Mahon, the Hon. Robert J. Padgett, the Hon. Frank Kelly and the Hon. John Walter Smith. “These men knew by long experience just what sort of man Mr. Gorman was.” True enough. But didn’t they also know “just what sort of man” the Hon. Austin Lane Crothers was in 1907? And hasn’t the Hon. Austin Lane Crothers, despite that sinister knowledge, that evil prophecy, made “the best Democratic Governor since the days of William T. Hamilton?”

But halt! A difference between the Hon. Mr. Gorman and the Hon. Mr. Crothers still persists—a difference largely occult and theoretical, but still a difference. It is this: that the Hon. Mr. Gorman, despite a high degree of personal virtue, has several times forgotten the promises of good government in the Democratic platform, while the Hon. Mr. Crothers, during all his pre-Gubernatorial career at Annapolis and in Cecil county, never once did so. Let us grant, against all the known facts and all the probabilities, that this difference is real. But isn’t it counterbalanced, overset, outweighed by various further differences—by differences indubitably genuine?

Let us see. The Hon. Mr. Crothers was chosen for high office by the very camorra which now offends the Hon. Mr. Cull. That camorra, at the time, was on the top wave of prosperity. Not for years had it been more bold, more powerful, more safe. In the great game of crooked politics it held a fistful of aces—some say seven or eight, some say as many as 40. And yet, despite that enormous advantage, despite the fact that the Hon. Mr. Crothers was its creature, and its organization was in perfect working order, and all the signs pointed to a memorable saturnalia of “practical” work—despite all this, it had to fight hard for every little scrap of pie, for every overripe, decadent plum, for every chance to make a dollar. In brief, the Hon. Mr. Crothers, once in office, made an honest effort to carry out his campaign promises. He did not always defeat the camorra’s schemes, for now and then it proved too clever and too strong for him, but even the Hon. Mr. Cull admits freely that he tried his darndest, and that sometimes a very considerable success crowned his endeavors.

The Hon. Mr. Gorman, we are told, is also a creature of this camorra. True enough; but, as I have said, with differences! The first difference is that its selection of him was formally ratified by the Democrats of Maryland in a primary election—that if the camorra nominated him, the people actually chose him. The second difference is that the prosperity and prospects of the camorra are vastly less today then they were in 1907. The white light is now upon it; it is under heavy fire; the people are alert to its misdeeds; fear penetrates its gizzard; it has lost its eyeteeth. Now, if the Hon. Mr. Crothers, the creature of the camorra, was able to shake off its tentacles in the heyday of its power and daring, when the cards seemed to be stacked in its favor and its heart leaped to the business, why shouldn’t the Hon. Mr. Gorman, the creature of the camorra plus the people, shake off its tentacles in its day of panic and disorganization, with the people and the newspapers and destiny on his side?

That is the question the Hon. Mr. Cull fails to answer. Or, to be more accurate, he answers it unconvincingly. His argument seems to be that the Hon. Mr. Gorman is an incurable traitor; that he will break all his promises; that his word is worth nothing–in brief, that he is the most disgusting liar and donkey in Christendom. Not many Maryland Democrats, I am sure, believe this. They allow the Hon. Mr. Gorman a reasonable share of good sense. They believe that he has seen the light. They believe that he will make an honest effort to carry out his promises. They believe that he has no desire to go down into history as a man entirely without honor, a man unutterably mendacious and vile, a man devoted wholly to betraying his fellow-men when they trust him and need him.

One can easily imagine, of course, better candidate–a candidate with no bad record to apologise for—a candidate indubitably, instead of merely probably, of honor and honest intent—for example, Blair Lee. But the Democrats of Maruland chose Gorman instead of Lee, and now he must be takan as he stands. The choice between him and the Hon. Mr. Goldsborough is not a simple choice between a devil and an archangel, as the Hon. Mr. Call would have us believe. Both men are practical politicians. Neither has attained eminence in the past by any noticeable frenzy for reform. Thus the one thing for the Democratic voter to decide is whether the Hon. Mr. Gorman’s promise to give Maryland decent government is appreciably less convincing than the Hon. Mr. Goldsborough’s. And against the theory that it is there stands the plain fact that if the Hon. Mr. Gorman fails, in the slightest, to meet his word, the future chroniclers of Maryland will have to discuss him, not as a man at all, but as a stench.

A shave and haircut to any registered voter who will advance one intelligible reason, not obviously satirical, for voting for the Hon. J. Albert Hughes. In point of fact, does any such reason exist? If so, let’s have it. I’ll be glad to print it.

After all, the worst thing that can be said of the super-Mahon is that he used to be a Prominent Baltimorean.