Baltimore Evening Sun (15 December 1911): 6.

Only 1,250 days more! But time enough to fill the Spring Gardens with tomato cans, to build 400 new facotries—and to raise the tax rate to $3.50!

Boil your drinking water! But you must pay for it before you boil it! And perhaps you’ll have to borrow money before you can pay for it!

VOX POPULI. The more you look into it, the more you get the ideer that them stuffers won’t never be tried never. ——— From one who sweats in doubt and hungers for advice:

I see in the Sunpaper that a man oughtn’t speak of his wife as Mrs. So-and-so when he mentions her to others. Well, then, what ought he call her? Certainly, it doesn’t seem right for him to use her first name.

My archivist, after a long search, has unearthed the article to which this gentleman refers. It was printed in the Sunpaper on December 5 and was in part as follows:

The average man doesn’t know what to call his wife when he talks of her. He is so used to calling her “mother” or “old lady,” or some such thing at home that when he has occasion to refer to her to a friend or a stranger he makes the error of calling her Mrs. Jones. Let him call her Jemima, if that’s her name, rather than this. He may call her anything but “Mrs. Jones” or “my better half.” These are the unpardonable sins.

A lamentable and typical example of newspaper inaccuracy, or rather of that vague mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy in which newspapers deal so copiously. The fact is, of course, that it is perfectly proper for a man to speak of his wife as “Mrs. Jones” to 99 per cent. of all the persons he meets in the world. That is the way he should refer to her when he speaks to the servants in his house, to the man who brings the ice, to the plumber, to the dressmaker’s collector, to his chauffeur, to the policeman on the beat, to his stenographer, to a waiter, to the ultimate divorce lawyer. But that is not the way he should refer to her when he speaks to his friends, to his associates in business, to the family physician, to any or all persons who approach him on terms of intimacy or equality. When he speaks to friends who are also friends to his wife he should say “Jemima;” when he speaks to equals who know his wife only slightly, or not at all, he should say “my wife”—not “Mrs. Jones,” or “Mrs. Mary Jones,” or “Mrs. John W. Jones,” but simply “my wife.”

Such are the laws of etiquette, of civilization, of common decency, in force for 500 years and identical in all Christian countries. For a man to refer to his wife, when speaking to an equal, as “Mrs. Jones” is just as absurd and offensive as for him to refer to his son as “Mr. George” or to his daughter as “Miss Lizzie.” All three forms assume a certain inferiority in the person addressed. All have that note of formality which is impolite and insulting among equals. A man, speaking of his daughter to a servant, may quite properly say “Miss Lizzie,” but in speaking to his business partner or to the family doctor or to a personal friend or to any other acquaintance whom he recognizes, either openly or tacitly, as intimate or equal, such formality grows ludicrous and obnoxious. To all persons of that sort his daughter must be either “Lizzie” or “my daughter.” And by the same token, his wife must be either “Jemima” or “my wife.”

I go into this matter at length because, in the first place, its discussion in the Sunpaper shows that it is at present engaging many minds, and, in the second place, because I daily encounter persons who seem to have been misled by bad advice. The persistent use of “Mrs. Jones,” in brief, is fast becoming a Baltimore custom. It therefore behooves all advocates of purity and intelligibility in human speech not to mention all connoisseurs of etiquette, to loose a loud bawl for the true, the good and the beautiful.

The whole question, of course, is a mere question of niceties—but civilization itself is a mere question of niceties. All the little habits and customs which differentiate a civilized white man from a Philistine are trivial in their essence. After all, it is a small matter whether one conveys peas to the mouth with a knife, a fork or a ladel. And yet that small matter is sufficient to divide the human race into distinct species. And so with varbal elegancies. It is no felony to say “I would have went,” and yet the mere act of saying it is sufficient to attach to any man, however respectable otherwise, a degree of odium comparable to that following the wearing of pulsewarmers, participation in politics or the unprovoked murder of an infant in arms.

More anon upon this question of forms of reference and address. A whole page might be written upon the sinister American custom which permits relatives-in-law, without invitation or permission, to address a man by his first name. That staggering indignity is so common among us that few persons ever think to oppose, or even to question it. And yet it strikes at the very roots of that lofty self-respect, that alert sensitiveness, that uncompromising fastiousuess, which, to the civilized white man, constitute the whole content and meaning of existence.

Warning by the Hon. Robert F. Lee, secretary the Hon. Mahoni Amicus.

The merit system * * * would admit niggeros as officeholders!!!

Well, so too the present system. The City Council has had a niggero member for years. Does any gentleman in the house argue that the present niggero member is the worst member? If so, on what ground?

Remarks by the Hon. Jacob Epstein at the City-Wide Congress:

If we could accomplish things in Baltimore by talk, we would be the biggest city in America. I do not know of any city where they do so much talking in proportion to what is accomplished as in Baltimore. Why, we have been talking about paving our strests for 15 years, but haven’t paved them yet. * * * I’m not knocking Baltimore.

Let us take the honorable gentleman’s word for it. But if he wasn’t kncking, just what was he doing? Spoofing? Tickling? Sugaring? Or merely elocutioning?

Net results of the current boom to date:

Banquets arranged............................................................... 46
Flashlight photographs taken.............................................. 122
Committees appointed........................................................1,254
Prominent Baltimoreans manufactured................................ 116
Proclamations issued............................................................ 73
Local newspapers denounced for woodpecking (times)...... 981
New factories brought to Baltimore..................................... 0

Of the taxable property in Maryland, but 58 per cent. is in Baltimore. But Baltimore pays 78 per cent. of the State’s expenses. Laugh, suckers, laugh!