Baltimore Evening Sun (8 November 1911): 6.

Oh, my! Oh, my, my! Oh, mym my, my! Oh, my, my, my, my!

The cry of the Sob Squad on this sad, sad day:

All is lost–including honor!

The Voice of the People, as the acrid fumes bring it in:

I voted for Preston all right, but I couldn’t stand for no Carr, nor no J. Albert Hughes neither. Now you’ll hear them boomers tyrin’ to argue they done it.

Alas, for the issue of newspaper persecution! The discard already engulfs it. Just six months ago it helped the Hon. James Harry Preston to high office, but yesterday it slipped from under the Hon. Robert H. Carr and left him struggling for life in a lake of his own tears. The lesson, gents, is plain. The people are asses now and then–but not permanently.

The Hon. J. Albert Hughes, it is to be hoped, will profit by the somewhat barbarous operation performed upon him yesterday. Mr. Hughes is an intelligent, a civilized, an honorable man. He bears a good name in the business community; he has sagacity, foresight, shrewd judgment. But in politics, to adopt a phrase of the day, he got in bad. Like many a respectable business man before him, he thought that he could go joyriding in a mudscow and yet keeo clean. He quickly discovered his error. When the going became suddenly heavy and the mud began to fly he was besppattered from head to foot. The voters, contemplating him, found no joy in his aspect. They defeated him.

Fortunately enough, the hurts inflicted by such parlous adventures are not incurable. They hurt for a time, but they do not hurt forever. Mr. Hughes is still a young man. What is more, he is undoubtedly a reflective man. It is thus very probable that he has already deduced a sound moral from his experience and that the future will see him carefully avoiding the errors of the past. There is room for such a man on the side of good government. As a foe to Mahonism he can accomplish more than as an apologist for Mahonism—more for the city of Baltimore and more for himself. It is sincerely to be hoped and reasonably to be expected that his next venture into politics will be as fully as creditable as this late one was the reverse and that the voters will show their approval of the change by turning their thumbs up instead of down. A Prominent Baltimorean in active practice is not of much value to this suffering town, but a reformed and dephlogisticated Prominent Baltimorean may serve high uses.

Only 1,288 days more! But happy days they will be!

A local paper speaks of a certain native magnifico as “a very prominent Baltimorean.” This suggests an inquiry into the difference between a Prominent Baltimorean and a Very Prominent Baltimorean. Until the matter can be more accurately determined, let us cling to the provisional theory that the difference is exactly that between a stale egg and a very stale egg.

Good for “Tom” McNulty! It wasn’t a home run, true enough, but it was certainly one of the prettiest sacrifice flies ever made on the political diamond.

Some intellectual prize fighter, writing in the London Times, issues an eloquent defiance to those pale and translucent moralists who incessantly denounce the manly art as barbarous. I do not know the name of this scrivening gladiator—his article, like most others in the Times, is anonymous–but the high respectability of the Times itself is sufficient guarantee that he is real. No more respectable newspaper, indeed, is to be found in the wide, wide world. Not even The Sun, taking one day with another, practices a more austere virtue—albeit the Times is occasionally dissolute enough to spell out such awful words as h——l and d——n, instead of disemboweling and spitting them a la Maryland.

This offense is common to all the English papers. A certain primeval vulgarity lingers in the English character. The high levels of American morality, and particular of baltimorality, are yet to be reached by a race which openly discusses so indecent a thing as taking a bath. There is even a record of an English newspaper reporting that a certain duchess had broken her leg! Imagine it! No Baltimore lady ever breaks her leg, at least in the public prints. She may fracture her limb, or rather, to adopt the favorite reportorial phrase, she may sustain a fracture of her limb, but she never breaks her leg. And the reason therefor is very simple; in the eyes of a moral press she has no leg.

But, as I have said, the Times, as English papers go, is a very respectable sheet and not given to yellow mendacity, and so we may assume that its antic correspondent is real, despite his somewhat startling talent for literary composition. What he seeks to show in his article is that prize fighting is not nearly so barbarous a sport as its foes seek to make it appear—that it is not, indeed, a barberous sport at all. But men are walloped in the ring! Their ears swell; their eyes close; their noses leak blood! True enough—but hear the witness:

Even the pain of a very severe blow (provided it does not disturb the solar plexus) passes unnoticed in the exhilaration of the game. It is not the other fellow’s hitting, but one’s own and the perpetual motion which is the exhausting factor * * * In a word, there is no more agony in a boxing bout than in a well-contested sprint or a three-quarter run down the touch-line—not a particle more. Many famous boxers, of whom the writer has inquired, have ratified this.

And the testimony of every habitual frequenter of boxing clubs must ratify it too. Time and time again, a blow which draws blood is passed unnoticed by the recipient. In the excitement of the contest he apparently doesn’t feel it at all. If every blow he receives actually hurt him—if it hurt him as it would hurt him if inflicted in cold blood and unexpectedly–he would perish of agony in four rounds. But it doesn’t. Later on, of course, when the time comes to plaster him and patch him, he is probably aware of certain disagreeable aches and stings–but while the fight is on he is not bothered by any save the most appalling wallops.

So much for the effect upon the gladiator. But what of the effect upon the spectator? Is it brutalizing, degrading? If so, then many men of good reputation and apparently decent behavior must be abyssmal brutes in secret, for you will find them pretty regularly at the ringside–and obviously enjoying the sport. Are they really brutes? Don’t believe it! Only the professional moralist believes it. As a matter of fact, boxing, when the contestants really know how to box, is one of the least brutal of sports. Its rules frown down upon the slight-

[Probably continued tomorrow.]