Baltimore Evening Sun (2 January 1912): 6.

Only 1,232 days more! And by the end of 1912, only 868 days more! Speed swiftly, Time!

If them guys down in the City Hall keep on puttin’ up water rents, pretty soon it’ll cost almost as much to take a wash Sat’d’y night as what it does to get loaded Sat’d’y night.

The following proposed rule for the protection of passengers is respectfully submitted to the general manager of the United Railways Company:

Whenever there is room available, passengers are to be permitted to bring market baskets, packages, tools of trade, work materials and other reasonable luggage aboard cars. It is the aim of the company in this regard to serve the public convenience as far as possible. But conductors will refuse to carry all packages or other objects which exhale dissagreeable odors, or throw off dust, or are likely to injure or annoy passengers otherwise, or to do damage to their clothes. Specifically, the carriage of the following things is forbidden:

Plumbers’ furnaces. Buckets of paste. Fish baskets. Buckets of whitewash. Plasterers’ outfits. Whitewash brushes. Paint pots. Live poultry. Rolls of tin. Bags of guane. Offal and garbage. Hides.

If any sociologist in the house can think of any reasonable objection to this rule, I shall be very glad to hear and print it. The United Railways, it should be remembered, already exercises a certain degree of discrimination in admitting freight to its care. Live dogs, for example, are banned, save when accompanied by special permits, though dead dogs, I believe, are admitted freely. During the week before Christmas, if I am correctly informed by my spies, Christmas trees were not carried. Again, I have often seen a conductor turn down a poor colored woman with a basket of wash, or a poor Russian Jew with an armful of pantaloons. If such fastidiousness is allowed by the company, why not a further and more intelligent fastidiousness? Why not try, in brief, to give passengers actual protection?

Let a few more months go by and nobody won’t hardly know no more what all that excitement last October was about.

Seven cheap but clean cigars to the Hon. Henry A. McMains, etc., etc., etc. Going! Going!

From one with a thirst for the overt act:

You make a plea for a counter-refomation against boomery and buncombe and say that there are 1,000 Baltimoreans eligible for the work. Well, who are they? Who is fit to oppose the slobber-gobble which now pesters us? Who will lead the fight against political mountebanks, fanatical purists and sellers of economic cure-alls? Who will bring us back to intellectual honesty and common sense?

It was not my purpose to nominate the delegates: all I ventured to do was to issue the call for the convention. But this challenge cannot go disregarded. Accordingly, I name five Baltimoreans whose points of view and habits of mind fit them supremely for this glorious labor—five Baltimoreans whose passion is for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—five Baltimoreans whose eagle eyes penetrate infallibly every pretense and sentimentality—five Baltimoreans with an instinctive and ineradicable antipathy to balderdash, however lovely—to wit:

The Hon. Jake Hook. The Hon. Thomas G. Boggs. The Hon. Public Man Biggs. The Hon. Harry Nice (minority member) The Right Hon. Mahoni Amicus, ex-officio.

Our modern Venables and Nietzsches—alert foes of flapdoodle—hot partisans of the cold fact—men not soothed and anæsthetized by wind music. For Instance, Hook, discoverer of the one flabbergasting, devastating objection to the merit system. For instance, Nice, sturdy sentinel against public clamor and clapper-clawing and the hysteria of the judiclary. And there are more. I could name you 100. But these are the chiefs, the leaders, the doctors subtilis and universalis. These are the men who will lead us out of the wilderness.

You hear a lot of gabble outen the City Hall about pavin’ assessments bein’ laid onto poor people, but so far nobody ain’t heerd nothin’ about no asphalt bein’ laid onto no cobblestones.

The City Council, in 1912, will cost the taxpayers of Baltimore $63,447—that is, supposing it to keep within its appropriation, which it didn’t do in 1911. Its salary list will come to $47,750. It will spend $9,000 for printing, and the rest will go for postage stamps, stationery, ice and “incidentals” and to pay its outatanding debts. It began the year owing $5,362.

Whay will the taxpayers of Baltimore get for their $63,447—$1,220 a week—$175 a day—2 cents on the tax rate? Nothing better than a fourth-rate burlesque show. In 1912, as in 1911, the chief energies of the councilmen will be devoted to getting jobs for ward heelers. That done, they will strike pulses, roll their eyes and make speeches in bad English. That done, they will devise new ways to obstruct intelligent improvements, to further unintelligent improvements, to fritter away the public money. That done, they will obey the orders of their bosses.

A few exotic, unearthly Councilmen of the Bond-Tolson-Binswanger type, strangers in a strange land, will oppose this buffoonery. Now and then, perhaps, that opposition of theirs will have a momentary effect. They will be able to knock out, once in a great while, some peculiarly atrocious ordinance, some extraordinarily astounding piece of stupidity. But in the long run, fate will be against them. The majority will stick to the theories and principles of the Old-Fashioned Administration.

And for all that ghastly show the taxpayers will pay $63,447, or $1,220 a week, or $175 a day!

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Swat the fly! Shampoo the little dears with kerosene!

Baltimore sends one Delegate to Annapolis to every 23,250 of population. The counties send one Delegate to every 9,500. Laugh, suckers, laugh!

More tips for the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society, the unquenchable, the undismayed:

At Bayview Asylum, last Saturday night, 460 helpless paupers were forced to submit to another involuntary scouring. Dr. J. Hugo Botts, chief surgeon of the London Peruna Hospital, announces the discovery that Dr. Simon Flexner’s new meningitis serum causes delirium tremens.