Baltimore Evening Sun (11 November 1911): 6.

Only 1,284 days more. Go to it, Padgett! The days are flitting past fast!

The voice of the people, as the sulphurous fumes bring it in:

I knowed we could depend on them election supervisors. Maybe Preston ain’t there with the punch! What!

The Hon. Arthur Pue Gorman, Jr., to the Hon. Phillips Lee Goldsborough, three days after the election:

Congratulate you, upon being returned as elected Governor.

Which interesting revelation of smallness, of childish ill temper, will doubtless reconcile many a Democrat to the defeat of the Hon. Arthur Pue Gorman, Jr.

The super-Mahon! The super-Mahon! Made a face and away he ran!

Whereby it appears that the Hon. Charles H. Carter has made one more contribution to the long list of services rendered to Baltimore, and particularly to the cause of good government in Baltimore, by Prominent Baltimoreans.

Say what you will against the Hon. the super-Mahon—and, like all the rest of us, he has his weaknesses, his foibles, his faults—you cannot deny his hold upon the imagination of the osseocaputs, nor can you deny his skill at extending and strengthening that hold and at turning it to profit. He has a perfect understanding of the osseocapital mind. He pumps into it the very sort of stuff that it is best fitted to absorb. He inflames its emotions, plays upon its prejudices, capitalizes its stupidity. He is, in brief, a rabble-rouser of the highest credit—a virtuose of paralogy—an unexampled fiddler of popular jigs.

The issue of Tuesday’s plabiscite, it must be plain, brought no flattering unction to his soul. As an intelligent man—which he undoubtedly is—he must have undorstood very clearly why other intelligent men voted against the Hon. Mr. Gorman, selig! He must have seen the obvious connection between their discontent with his own course in office and their distrust of the Hon. Mr. Gorman’s. He must have realized at once that the catastrophe would be laid to his door—that the more reflective members of his party would blame him. And what was his answer? His answer, ignoring the more reflective men of his party entirely, was simply a bold appeal to the least reflective, to those incapable of reflection at all—a daring attempt to throw the whole blame upon other shoulders, to hold his ignorant followers together by arousing their unreasoning passions, to make the Hon. Mr. Gorman a martyr to tyranny and slander and himself a sharer in the martyrdom.

A daring enterprise—and no doubt a successful one. The reflective Democrat, of course, found that incandescent Open Letter more amusing than convincing. It was an interesting exercise in sophistry—a curious example of an expert paralogist’s technic—and nothing more. Its charge that The Sun’s advocacy defeated the Hon. Mr. Gorman went slambang into the plain fact that The Sun’s advocacy did not defeat the Hon. Messrs. Harrington and Poe. Its charge that The Sun’s opposition elected the Legislative ticeket went crashing into the fact that the Legislative ticket was elected only in part—that the solitary candidate The Sun actively opposed was defeated, while the three candidates it actively supported were elected.

But these considerations and others like them appealed only to the reflective Democrat—to whom the Open Letter was not addressed. The osseocapital Democrat, to whom it was addressed, found no such difficulties in ingesting it. Its hot fervor stirred his heart and its bad logic did not annoy him. Its net effect, the sum of its emotional effects, was probably that of vastly increasing his respect for the super-Mahon—as a brave tyrannicide, as an irreconcilable champion of democracy, and, above all, as a subtle and skilful dialecticlan, with the learning of a Duns Scotus and the cunning of a middle-aged serpent.

Here is a fact that must be borne constantly in mind in considering the sayings and doings of the super-Mahon. His strength is with the osseocaput and it is to the osseocaput that he always addresses himself. He is, in brief, a professional rouser of the rabble. His effort is to awaken and inflame its emotions, for all of its so-called reasoning is done emotionally. One day he appeals to its passionate pride—its pride in its own incredible faiths and ideas—its pride in its own stupidity. The next day he appeals to its hatred—its hatred of all who pretend to superior knowledge, and in particular of all who support pretension with demonstration.

Thus he lives and has his political being. Thus he to able to defy the intelligent minority. At the present moment no doubt it would be difficult in all Baltimore to find 100 men oif his own education and intelligence to defend the things that he has done or the things that he has said. His own class is almost unanimously against him—and he knows it very well. But down at the bottom of the scale a large class is with him—and it is with the aid of that class that he does business. It approves his attacks upon the Finneys and Numsens because the Finneys and Numsens are intelligent and, therefore, scoundrels. It supports his attacks upon the independent newspapers for the same reason. It supports him in his opposition to the merit system because the merit system puts a penalty upon stupidity. It supports him in all his other battles for pure and undulterated democracy because that sort of democracy holds as its first orinciple, not merely that an ignorant man is fully as good as an intelligent one, but also that he is probably a shade better. And it will prove its faith and its joy in him when the new charter comes up for judgment by voting to save him.

It is easy enough to denounce the super-Mahon for playing the part he has chosen. It seems wrong to many folk for a man of education and good breeding to throw in his lot with the ignorant, to attain to power by appealing to their passions and prejudices, to trade his intelligence for three cheers. But if you denounce him thus you denounce the whole scheme of absolute democracy, of universal manhoods suffrage. If it is right for all men, however stupid, to have a voice in the government of the State, then it is right for any man to aspire to lead them, or any faction of them—and it must be manifest that the only way such a man can win and hold the large and stupid and emotional faction at the very bottom is by acquiescing in its abysmal stupidity and playing upon its fiery emotions.