Baltimore Evening Sun (2 February 1912): 6.
Sad words of Councilman Hildebrandt, of the Twentieth ward:
The City Council has been attacked. It has been held up to ridicule and scorn. It has lost public respect.
Perhaps the Hon. Mr. Hildebrandt will now explain just how the Council has managed to lose something it never had.
The more them boomers boom, the more Baltimore don’t seem to boom none.
Confident remarks by the Hon. Murray Vandiver, of Havre de Grace:
I may have violated Section 167, which allows me but 20 days after election to file my statement. But supposing I am guilty under that section, who is to be the judge of it? The Harford County Court alone * * * And I have heard no complaint from that source and feel assured I shall not.
An affecting example of pious faith in the judiciary. What is the first duty of a court? To enforce the laws? Not at all. Rather to see that no perfect gentleman is annoyed by them.
When a person sets down an’ begins to think about that case against the former sheriffs, first thing you know he busts out laffin’.
Recent admissions to the Home for Crippled and Indigent Laws:
THE PRIMARY ELECTIONS LAW: paresis, carbuncles and a compound fracture of the diaphragm. THE CORRUPT PRACTICES LAW: dog bites, malaria and surgical shock.
Boil your drinking water! Forget not the Prominent Baltimoreans on the Ward Heelers’ Dashing Harry Committee! Cover your garbage can! Get a license for your dog! Swat the fly!
Eighteen anonymous clippings, received in this morning’s mail, call my attention tothe fact that some gay fellow removed my hide in yesterday’s Letter Column. My thanks to these kind friends. Anon, anon! The rules allow a count of nine.
The betting odds in the downtown kaifs, as the whisper of them reaches me:
75,000 to 1 that no harm won’t never come to Murray for putting a dent in that bum Corrupt Practices law. 1,000,000,000,000 to 1 that Bob gets his fair share—and then some. 1 to 575,000 that Jake is on the level about them merit system niggeroes.
First them bum reformers jam that Corrupt Practices act through the Legislature—and then good old Murray makes a comic vlentine out’n it. Who’s looney now?
Discoursing yesterday upon the progress of the woman’s suffrage movement I drew an affecting picture of the woman of today, marooned in her home, an idiot in the eye of the law, esteemed in direct proportion to her ignorance and childishness. I ran out of space before that picture, in all of its exquisite details, was complete, but there is no need, fortunately enough, to go on with it, for the woman of today is making a rapid escape from the famous three Ks of the German Emperor. It is no longer considered pretty for a lady to be an ignoramus. She may acquire a considerable stock of political economy, of philosophy, of commercial acumen and even of physiology without being stoned to death. The decay of that melancholy indecency which once passed for propriety has restored to her her diaphragm and her legs, and the decay of that slavery which once passed for superiority has restored to her her cerebrum and her cerebellum.
Human society, as a condition of its swift economic progress, has had to draft her for multitudinous and complex labors, and in return for her acquiescence it has had to strike off her old shackles. She is no longer a lay figure, a cipher in the State. The lady, her supreme and perfect type, becomes as rare and as ridiculous as the sorcerer or the barber-surgeon. We expect a woman of today to show a certain alertness of mind, a certain practical efficiency, a certain originality and independence of spirit. It is no longer considered scandalous for her to work out a theology of her own, to have books of her own or to seek a trade or profession of her own. Not only do we admit her to such rights, but we actually insist that she exercise them, or, at any rate, some of them.
In millions of cases, for example, we make her go to work. Well, in going to work she inevitably comes into contact with those laws which regulate and condition work—that is, with the most important laws on our statute books. She must obey them; mold her desires to fit them; adapt her whole life to them. And thus giving them her support, she at once acquires the right to discuss their character, even to propose changes in them, and that right leads, by a short step, to the ballot. It is inconceivable, under a free democracy, that a citizen should have the right to debate a law and yet no right to vote upon it. Any land in which such an absurdity is permitted is no more a free democracy than Russia.
So much for the mere right to vote. The duty follows clearly from the right. A woman who obeys a law without reflecting, at some time or other, upon its wisdom and its justice, and without reaching, through that reflection, some notion that it might be better, is obviously a numbskull, and in consequence a mere cipher in the State. But a woman who does so reflect, and who does come to such conclusions, is under a plain obligation to voice and maintain them, for if they do not embody a plan to work her own good, then they at least embody a plan to work some other woman’s (or man’s) good, and in consequence she commits an offense against society when she keeps them secret.
We human beings are not creatures in vacuo. We cannot possibly live for two hours running without influencing, in some way or other, the lives of others. Nor can we so influence other lives without, by reflection and reaction, modifying our own. Therefore, it is our highest duty to society to engage, actively and incessantly, in that interchange and assaying of ideas which alone makes progress possible. To shirk that duty is as bad as to shirk any other duty—the duty of respecting the property of others, the duty of keeping clean. If we do shirk it, then we become mere slaves of the alert majority—slaves of the very sort that women were before the industrial process routed them out of their cages and laid upon them the necessity of adjusting themselves, alertly and intelligently, to the stimuli of a new and fluent environment.
[Continued tomorrow if all goes well.]