Baltimore Evening Sun (10 November 1911): 6.

[Continued from the other day.]

est attempt at unfair play. The men face each other in the open: thousands of critical eyes observe their slightest movement. Each has a fair chance to defend himself; there is no danger of being attacked from the rear; the character of all possible blows is known in advance; the whole thing is far less a contest of brute strength than one of agility, of skill, of presence of mind. Everything else being equal, the more intelligent fighter wins.

Football and foot-racing are 10 times as brutal, 10 times as dangerous, 10 times as exhausting. Even the boxer who has been knocked out squarely, say by a blow on the jaw, is in far better condition, half an hour afterward, than the marathon runner who has completed 10 miles. No imaginable injury in the prize ring can be so horrible as the injuries inflicted upon immature boys, with weapons and from behind, in football games. And yet football is a game for gentlemen to play and for ladies to observe–while boxing is indecent and immoral!

What silly rot! How much better the world would be if the cult of the efficient body were not under the moral ban! How much better if the ability to defend oneself, to fight a fair fight, to take and give hard blows, were an honor to a man instead of a disgrace! Lay one more crime at the moralists’ door! One more proof of their frenzy for making the decent indecent and the good bad!

Only 1,285 days more? Only 30,840 hours! Only 1,850,400 minutes! Only 111,024,000 seconds!

Add another to the Hon. the super-Mahon’s list of virtues: be is there with the wallop.

Lost—A well-trained and docile apologist. When last seen was incased in the tunica laticlavia of a Public Man. Finder will please notify J. H. P., Room 1, second floor, City Hall.

And now the friends of the Hon. Arthur Pue Gorman, Jr., propose that he be saved by counting in the jackass vote.

Well, why not? If our benevolent laws give the franchise to men so appallingly stupid that they can’t distinguish between three and four, then why not count their ballots after they have voted? If the Declaration of Independence is good doctrine as well as good poetry, if universal manhood suffrage is really compatible with civilization, then why not accept it frankly, and its consequences with it?

Mr. Gorman, of course, cannot argue that the intelligent voters of Baltimore were with him on Tuesday. It is obvious to everyone that the majority of them were firmly against him. But our laws give the intelligent voter no monopoly of voting. The rights of his unintelligent brother are just as inalienable as his own. In the polling place the two are exact equals. Between Dr. Remsen or Cardinal Gibbons on the one hand and the latest artificial citizen from “Bill” Garland’s mill on the other not the slightest difference exists. The law presumes that they are equally sapient, equally patriotic, equally honest.

Therefore, why not count Gorman’s bonehead friends? Why let them go to the polls and vote–and then refuse, on the absurd plea that they are imbeciles, to count their votes? The imbecility of most of them, it must be manifest, was plainly visible when they registered and again when they appeared to vote. And yet it did not keep them from registering and it did not keep them from voting. Why bring it forword as a new discovery, as something unsuspected and discreditable, as something sufficient to disfranchise them ex post facto?

All statutes which invalidate a ballot for errors made in marking it are hypocritical and absurd. If a man is intelligent enough to go on the register of voters, then it should be admitted that he is intelligent enough to vote, and that possible errors in marking the ballot are no more than signs of his human fallibility. All of us make mistakes occasionally. Instead of penalizing such inevitable mistakeis with the capital punishment of disfranchisement, the judges and clerks should be permitted to allow for them, to interpret them reasonably, to take account of the honest and intelligent intent behind them.

Unluckily, that is not quite possible at present. Too many voters, it appears, give no sign of any such honest and intelligent intent. A large number, perhaps, are incapable of the ratiocination necessary to the formulation of any such honest and intelligent intent. Well, then, why are these numbskulls permitted to vote at all? Why clutter up the ballot boxes with their crazy ballots? Why permit them to swell the line on election morning and waste the time of civilized human beings? Why not disfranchise them, in brief, before they vote, instead of after they vote, and so save trouble and expense?

The weakness of the present law; of course, is not unique. It is common, indeed, to many other American laws. It is the weakness of trying to combat a disease instead of trying to prevent it, of dealing with effects instead of with causes. Our Maryland law, for example, recognizes a dozen grounds for divorce, and yet recognizes not a single ground for prohibiting marriage. In the same way we give any jackass who applies for it the right to vote–and then try to repair the damage by throwing out his vote after he has cast it.

The Hon. John Walter Smith to the common people, at the Lyric, November 3:

There is no good reason whatever to sustain any Democrat in voting against either of these gentlemen [the Hon. Messrs. Carr and Hughes] that I can possibly find after studying the case carefully.

John Walter Smith! John Walter Smith! What brains you do your studying with!

The super-Mahon! The super-Mahon! What knave would dare affix a can to such a lordly, lovely man?

The betting odds in the downtown kaifs, as my liquorish spies report them:

40 to 1 that the charter of the Red Cross Committee will not pass the Legislature. 10 to 1 that whatever charter is passed will be submitted to the people. 5 to 1 that the people will reject it.

The Voice of the People, as the hot winds waft it in:

Them boomers do Harry Preston no harm. Now I guess “Bob” Padgett’ll begin to get on the job.

Way for the super-Mahon’s private charter commission! Clear the stage for the big show!