Baltimore Evening Sun (1 February 1912): 6.
The daily thought from “Also sprach Zarathustra”:
It is higher to acknowledge one’s ___ wrong than to carry the point—especially if one be right.
Remark by Judge Thomas Ireland{?} Elliott, sitting in the Criminal Court:
It is necessary for the ignorant—__ people who have just coem to this court___ from foreign lands—to be impressed _____ the swiftness of punishment.
And also, it may be added, with ___ swiftness of judicial processes in general, civil as well as criminal. ____ what must those new Americans think who study the history of ___ case against the four ex-Sheriffs, ____ near the end of its third year and ___ yet come to trial—a case in which ___ I make no mistake, the extreme deliberation of a certain judge, here to ___ nameless, caused a delay of more than a year.
For the sake of clarity I append a brief review of this cause celebre:
1909. January 20—Governor Crothers announces that three of the ex-Sheriffs ____ retained fees amounting to $10,275 more than their constitutional allowance.
June 2—Attorney-General Straus ___ suits for the recovery of the money.
June 29—The three defendants demand an itemized account.
July 14—Mr. Straus refuses it.
July 29—The matter is put up to ___ judge.
August 18—An additional suit, against a fourth ex-Sheriff, is filed.
August 20—This fourth ex-Sheriff ____ demands an itemized account.
August 30—Mr. Straus refuses.
Sepember 29—The matter is put up ___ the judge.
September 30—The judge begins considering it.
1910. November 28—After 14 months’ med___tion the judge decides that no itemized account need be filed.
1911. March 11—Defendants appeal from the decision of the judge. December 13—The Court of Appeals sustains the judge.
1912. Nothing doing so far.
An inspection of this record shows that there have been two long delays. The first, lasting from September 30, 1909, to November 28, 1910, was caused by the extreme deliberation of the judge sitting in the lower court. The second, lasting from March , 1911, to December 13, of the same year, was caused by the extreme deliberation of the Court of Appeals. The two courts had exactly the same question before them, and the two together took 23 months to answer.
Them ex-Sheriffs don’t seem to be botherin’ none, nor nobody wouldn’t who had the money salted down as safe as they got it.
Ten thousand dollars reward to any rhetorician or logician who will come forward with a single argument, not obviously fallacious or facetious, against the extension of the suffrage to women. The nearest approach to such an argument—the only one with the slightest plausibility in it—is the pestiferous version of the argumentum ad hominem which rests upon the admitted absurdity and grotesquerie of some of the suffragettes. But, as Oscar Wilde long ago pointed out, the truth of a doctrine has nothing whatever to do with the respectability, or even with the sincerity of its advocates. Francis Bacon was a corruptionist and a hypocrite—in short, a politician—and yet his platitudes remain as true as any proposition of Euclid. Nietzsche was a lunatic, and yet his gospel, in the main, is a clarion bellow for sanity in thinking. Johannes Mueller drank beer incessantly and read novels on Sunday, and yet his contributions to biology remain the glories of that science. Newton recanted on his knees, and yet the things that he recanted were undying truths, and he knew it.
Therefore, it is silly to argue against the extension of the suffrage on the ground that some of the suffragettes do not darn their husbands’ socks, or on the ground that others drug their hearers with alcohol, or on the ground that others are mere social climbers, with far more interest in the society column than in the great problems of political economy and jurisprudence. Admitting all these things to be true, what are the odds? What have the motives of the spellbinders got to do with the honesty of his cause? Most good causes, in truth, are maintained, at least in part, by hired and professional rhetoricians, whose personal interest in them is small. The most affecting sermon I ever heard was preached by a clergyman who read Rabelais and chewed tobacco. He was far from a pious man, and certainly not an ascetic, but all the same he was an extremely eloquent man, and so he did good service to a good cause.
All the other arguments against the extension of the suffrage strike as wholly puerile and unconvincing. For instance, the argument that the majority of women don’t want it. What in the world has their wanting it or not wanting it got to do with it? Very few healthy children, at least of the male sex, want to wash, and yet we make them do so by terrorism and downright brutality, and so conquer their repugnance. Again, very few healthy mean want to work—and yet they have to do it.
The error in this argument against the suffrage lies in mistaking the thing itself for a privilege, an amusement, a sort of rude, male vice, like alcoholism or faro. As a matter of fact, it is not a privilege or amusement or vice at all, but a duty—the highest duty, perhaps, laid upon human beings under a free republic. And women, if they are to take part otherwise in the business of democracy—for excample, in its industry, its art, its moralizing, its crime and its witch-burning—must inevitably face that duty. The notion of __ free to criticize the government and yet in nowise respnsible for the government is obnoxious to justice and to decency.
The woman of yesterday, of course, was not free to criticise the government. It was regarded as vulgar for her to express any opinion, or evne to have an opinion, about the organization and management of human society. That was work for men. In her nonage her father protected and thought of her; when she was married her husband took up the grim labor; when he, staggering under it died of it the State appointed guardians for her. She was, in the eye of the law, a perpetual minor. Society asked nothing of her save that she keep her house habitable and her children full of camomile. In return for that service she was relieved of all necessity for ratiocination. The less her striving for originality—i. e., the grater her stupidity—the better she was esteemed. To think an absolutely novel thought was as dangerous for her as to drown her offspring. Her heaven was the home, and the home was her hell.
[Probably continued tomorrow.]