Baltimore Evening Sun (20 November 1911): 6.

Only 1,275 days more! But time enough to “ruin” the Sunpaper 30 or 40 times!

Down o taxes! Hurrah, hurrah! Up go assessments! Hurray, hurray! Up go water rates! Hurroo, hurroo!

The formation of a Woman’s Auxiliary to the super-Mahonic Camorra, as indicated by a lively article in the One-Day Journal of Saturday, must touch the hearts of all who have hearts to be touched. There is need of woman’s nursing; there is need of woman’s tears.

Proposed oath for boomers, to prove theri complete freedom from pianissimo political ambition:

I, ------- --------, being sound in body and mind, do hereby solemnly promise and declare that my passion for boomery is a passion pure and undefiled; that it springs full-grown from a patriotic yearning to make my beloved city of Baltimore enormous and notorious; that it is uncontaminated, in the slightest degree, with any itch or hankering for public office, high or low, or with any desire to be mentioned for public office, in the public prints, at public victualings, or otherwise; that I would, in point of fact, if offered public office, however, exalted, decline it with scorn; and that my decision and determination so to decline and scorn it will and shall remain in full force and effect for the period of five calendar years next following the date of these presents. In nomine Domini!

To which, for the sake of clarity, I pend a translation into the vulgate:

Mr. ------- --------, knowing there ain’t nothing the matter with me, give you my word I am booming on the level and with nothing held back; that all I want is to boost Baltimore for all she is worth; that I ain’t no job-seeker, and don’t wnat no job, and don’t want nobody to push me for no job, neither in the newspapers nor anywhere else; that if somebody come to me and offered me a job I wouldn’t take it nor have nothing to do with it; and that I am going to stick to this ideer for at least five years. Thanking you one and all, I remain yours very respectfully.

Boil your drinking water! Send your money to the League for Medical Freedom! Watch the Narrenhaus!

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

I bet them Reform League muts begin to feel sick. Harry Preston done just exactly right. You don’t want none of them college professors for no jail warden. All the newspapers is after is to stir up some bum argument.

The unspeakable Wegg, the Belair Doctor Subtilissimus, filled half a column in The Evening Sun of last Friday with a labored discussion of my private character and habits, the aim of which was to prove me a bachelor, a German and a treacherous reviler of my fellow-osseocaputs. Well, well, wny all the waste of space! Not only was it unecessary to attempt to prove those allegations, but it would have been exceedingly dangerous, to the life, limb and exchequer of Wegg, to have attempted to disprove them. In brief, I admit them–and in tones as loud as the bawling of an Old-Fashioned job-seeker.

Believe me, my dear Wegg, it is impossible to rile a bachelor by calling him a bachelor. The fact of his bachelorhood is the one glorious, golden fact of his life. It is ample compensation for all his misfortunes. When a bachelor strikes his thumb with a hammer, or spills salt at table, or guesses the wrong horse in a poolroom, or has a tooth pulled, or finds a fly in his lamb stew, or receives a package covered with postage-due stamps, or misses a train, or slips on the ice, his swearing is always measurably less appalling than that of a married man. He may loose, perchance, one, two, or three galvanic dammes–but before the fourth leaps from his larynx the thought will flit through him that he is a bachelor, a free man, a being a capella–and straightway he will throttle his curses nad smile. That thought is worth more to him than medicine, more than money, more than fame. It keeps him happy and it keeps him gentle. He is the most enviable of men, and what is more he knows it very well and enjoys the knowlewdge intensely.

The one thing that can be brought against the dionysian bachelor, the one charge justly layable at his door, is the fact that he has no pity. I do not refer here, of course, to pity for the gals who try, by serpentine and abhorrent arts, to ensnare him. For such foes, when he beats them, he has no pity at all, for he knows how precious little they would pity him if the fortunes of war went the other way. What I mean is pity for the married man. The bachelor, in this department, shows a lamentable lack of feeling. Instead of pitying the married man, as one pathetically fallen, perhaps by accident, from his own high estate, he despises the married man. His favorite form of diversion, indeed, is (a) listening to the heart-breaking complaints and confidences of married men, and (b) laughing at them.

Thus the fellow has his faults, or rather, his fault. He is not entirely perfect. One can imagine improving him, at least in minor details. But taking him as he stands, he is still the happiest and most respectable creature visible in the profane universe. If the archangels are any happier, then they must be happy indeed. And if they are more respectable, then I can only say that such a degree of respectability must be a burden rather than a joy.

I am myself an extremely humble member of this exalted class–perhaps, in truth, a purely accidental member. But that is no reason why I should deny, hypocritically, its great merits and its greater privileges and prerogatives.

Tips for the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society:

In the United States, between January 1, 1910, and January 1, 1911, 638,782 infants of the human species were vaccinated. In the same country and during the same period, 662,754 infants fell out of high chairs. An accident rate of 105 per cent! Quod erat demonstrandum! Dr. Bingo Botts, F. R. S., M. D., the greatest living American pathologist, has lately proved, by indisputable evidence, that the much-heralded diphtheria antitoxin will not cure katzenjammer. Dr. Botts will be remembered as the distinguished man who demonstrated, last year, that the Widal reaction would not detect a fish bone in the gullet.

A motto for the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society:

Se non e vero, e ben trovato.

From the defense of a certain eminent rabble-rouser in the One-Day Journal:

Was not Aristides a politican? And Julius Cæsar? Machiavelli? And Armand de Richelieu? And Disraeli? And Lord Rosebery? And Bismarck? And Gladstone?

And Abe Reuf? And Tweed? And Croker? And Cox? And Schmitz? And Francis Bacon? And Pontius Pilate?

The suggestion of one filled with bile and scorpion juice:

Not the super-Mahon, but the sub-Mahon!

Well, well, why kick? We are saving three cents–and seeing a good show!