Baltimore Evening Sun (17 November 1911): 6.

Only 1,272 days more! Open now the door! You know how little while we have to stay, and, once departed, may return no more!

My spies inform me that the new schoolhouse on Ann street, near Central avenue, still remains purely theoretical. The children who should inhabit it are actually taught in the Broadway Institute and spend the daily recess playing on Broadway. The old houses on the lot were demolished long ago and the space was used as a playground during the summer. But so far no sign of the new schoolhouse has appeared. The new school at William street and Warren avenue, though long under roof, is still unused. Well, well, one thing at a time. The School Board, busy with the solemn business of rooting out the last vestige of the Van Sickle heresy, must needs go slowly in other matters.

Once more the charge has been made that the Hon. Charles H. Dickey, our esteemed round-sergeant of boomers, conceals sneaking political hopes beneath his boomer’s breastplate. Such are the slanders heaved at patriots! The world, being vile, cannot understand altruism. Fortunately, there is a way for the Hon. Mr. Dickey to freeze the tongues of his revilers. Let him go forthwith before Grannan, J., at the Central Police Station, and make solemn oath that political yearnings are not in him, that he wants no office, high or low, that he would not take an office if it were offered him–and let him make the term of his oath the term of his natural life. Thus, and thus only, can he escape that miasma of dubiety which now rolls over him.

Nominations (entirely unofficial) for the Orthodox Charter Commission, or super-Mahonic League of Counter-Reformers:

The Hon. Bernard J. Lee (chairman). The Hon. S. S. Field. The Hon. Francis K. Carey. The Hon. Public Man Biggs. The Hon. Robert J. Padgett. The Hon. Jane{?} Hook. The Hon. William J. Oakland.

Oh, horrors! Oh, shameful! In The Evening Sun of Wednesday, in the first column of Hon. Henry Edward Warner’s “Sidelights” department, the word d——nation appeared, spelled out! Not a dash in it! The awful first syllable in full, terrible and unashamed!

An error, of course–an incomprehensible, inexcusable, unspeakable error! The ghastly oversight, one may assume, of some liquorish typographer, his thoughts far away upon penuchle and fiddle music. Ere this, no doubt, the fellow has been hanged—or drowned in molten bichloride of mercury. A full surgical asepsis must be maintained at all costs. The chemical purity of Baltimore journalism must show no blot.

Boil your drinking water! Swat the few surviving, syncopic flies! Give a cheer for Bernie Lee! Watch the Narrenhaus!

The American language, so loose, so luscious, so lovely:

The late Hon. John P. Poe gave it as his opinion that if the Senate failed to confirm appointments * * * there would be no vacancy, and therefore would hold over for the next two years. He will be placed on record as a splendid administration and a good timber for the Governorship. And now the fear has been expressed that the recent Republican success will affect the city for the National Democratic Convention.

These beautiful samples of Amecian unashamed are from the Democratic Telegram, a local weekly devoted to the interest of the common people. Not only in manner, but also in matter, is the Telegram somewhat daring, as the following strophe will show:

Senator Gorman is taking his defeat in a manly way.

That Philadelphla surgeon who reduced the diameter of a fat woman by the bold device of excising a whole flitch of adipose tissue from what a decent journalist must denominate, virtuously, her stomach—that revolutionary and sanguinary fellow had better keep out of Baltimore. If he comes here and sets up his slaughterhouse a number of Prominent Baltimoreans will bawl lustily for the police. For just as there are Prominent Baltimoreans who owe all their prominence to the fact that their fathers made thrift a vice and others who owe all to their superb technique as honorary pallbearers, and yet others who owe all to a congenital deficiency in humor and shame, so there are others who must credit the whole or most of their eminence to their fortunate and impressive massiveness.

The world loves and respects a bulging man, a man convex and widespread. The luck of the Hon. William Howard Taft lies frankly in his bulk. The curse of the late Hon. J. B. Mahool lies frankly iun his lack of bulk. When the Hon. Mr. Mahool and the Hon. James Harry Preston went campaigning last spring the mere appearance of the two of them, in the same hall and on successive nights, was enough to make votes for the Hon. Mr. Preston. He filled the stage; he looked the viking, the doer of great deeds; the immense expanse of his facade bred confidence in the human heart; I myself voted for him for no other reason. The Hon. Mr. Mahool, on the contrary, bore an aspect of unimportance, of over-refinement, of impotence. It was impossible to imagine such a dapper and slender fellow grappling successfully with the goblins and dragons of the Narrenhaus. So the Hon. Mr. Preston won.

What is more, he deserved to win. A rotund, homeric, himalaysian man is commonly just as heroic as he looks. The world, here as elsewhere, is right in its judgment. All other things being equal, the man with a paunch is the man to trust. He has, to begin with, self-respect. He fills more space in the cosmos thab the average man, and he knows it. And in the second place he has might–the devastating might of sheer weight. He may be soft, clumsy, out of training—but one blow from his August fist is worth a thousand men. And finally, he has dignity, poise, what the vulgar call a good front. Nature planned him for the forefront of the fray. He looks well in the thick of things. He is never lost in a crowd. Unable to run, even if he would, he bravely stands his ground.

Away with that Philadelphia Finney and his war upon copiousness! Let him confine the practice of his hideous art to fat women! In the nobler sex a pillowy, billowy cross-section is no handicap, but a benefit–a perpetual certificate of character, an earnest of hearty masculinity, a proof of natural virtue. All truly sgacious and trustworthy men are bulky. I speak here, not from books, but from personal experience. I am myself of a figure noticeably ovoid.