Baltimore Evening Sun (5 February 1912): 6.

The autopsy upon the Corrupt Practices act shows that the Hon. Murray Vandiver’s poniard penetrated it on the left side, between the fifth and sixth ribs, and severed the aorta at the third hinge. There are also footprints upon the face of the deceased and one of its ears is missing. The coroner’s jury has brought in a verdict giving cholera infantum as the cause of death, denouncing the new charter and praising the character of Andrew Jackson.

Headline from the estimable Evening Sunpaper of Friday:

MERIT SYSTEM FOR PAVING BOARD Commission Strikes Blow at Spoils System

Oh, la, la! Oh, la, la, la! Oh, la, la, la, la! Oh, la, la, la, la, la!

The Hon. Clarence S. Darrow, now under indictment for bribery in Los Angeles, to his followers in Chicago:

I am innocent of the charges that have been brought against me and I hope that you will withhold judgment.

The very same thing that the Hon. Mr. Darrow was saying, two months ago, about his distinguished clients, the McNamara brothers.

A pair of celluloid ear-muffs to anyone who can tell whether the Hon. Jake Hook is now for the merit system or against it.

The roster of corpses in the morgue boomery:

The Star-Spangled Banner Exposition. The Major League Baseball Team. The See America First Convention. The Massmeeting of Booming School Children. The New Charter.

The daily thought from “Also sprach Zarathustra”:

Conscience is the voice of the herd.

One of the objections constantly made to the extension of the suffrage to women is the objection that the right to make laws should be granted only to those able to enforce them—that since women are unable to serve on the police force or in the army they should not be allowed to vote. A moment’s reflection is all that is necessary to reveal the imbecility of this argument. On the one hand, it sets up mere physical endurance as the test of a free citizen, and on the other hand it assumes gaily, and without the slightest evidence, that women would be unable to meet that test. Both the test and the assumption are fallacious. On the one hand, a citizen’s talent for warfare is by no means a condition of his capacity for making intelligent laws, and on the other hand the belligerent genius of the modern woman, if it is actually in abeyance, is in abeyance only because it has been paralyzed by public opinion.

The truth is, of course, that the business of making laws and that of enforcing them are entirely separate and distinct enterprises, and not only separate and distinct, but even, in some sense, antagonistic. The experience of the race has shown that the man trained for one, or leading a life fitting him for one, is not ordinarily fitted for the other. No one, for example, would think of delegating the business of legislation to the police force, nor would any sane man advocate putting delicate matters of foreign policy into the hands of the regular army or militia for determination. Such duties and problems are best handled by men trained to the work—that is to say, by men accustomed to reasoning with their cerebre, stomachs and pocketbooks and not with their fists. And by thus neglecting their fists, these men naturally produce a certain atrophy of their fists. The average statesman, in brief, is a paunchy and cyanotic fellow, with distinct signs of arterio-sclerosis upon his face.

Nature, being a conservationist, breeds specialists. The man who can lift a barrel of flour is usually a man who cannot understand the binomial theorem; the man who can devise a novel get-rich quick scheme and so milk the public is usually a man who couldn’t, for the life of him, milk a cow. And since no man is ever wholly without talents of some sort, large or small, it is pretty safe to assume, when he is found to lack one sort, that he possesses, in some measure, the other sort. Find a man who cannot distinguish between a rondeaux and a triolet and you will almost invariably see a man with an abnormal capacity for handling mules; find a man who shows a concave facade and trnaslucent ears and you will almost invariably see a man who has read Kant, Montesquieu and Balzac and is familiar with the theory of least squares. Such is nature’s laws of compensation. Such is the normal division of labor in the world.

For many centuries women have been forbidden, for reasons chiefly fanciful, to take a hand in the rough hacking and walloping of civilization, and as a result they have suffered a measurable degeneration of their muscles and sinews. Today they are generally smaller than men and generally weaker. But that very degeneration in one department has favored an enormous development in the opposite department. That is to say, women have come to possess an extraordinary stock of craft, of sapience, of prudence. Romanticists call it intuition—and praise it. Realists call it cunning—and damn it. But whatever its true name, there it is. The average man, in the prize ring, is a fair match for two women, but let him go into a contest of wits, and one woman will floor him with ease. For every Samson in the world there is a Delilah. Every creature who wears pantaloons is hen-pecked. Every one of us adapts his whole life to the behests and chicaneries of some woman or group of women.

This craft of women, true enough, has not been exercised, in the past, in the field of political intrigue, at least not directly. But that has been a mere accident. Once open the doors, and it will show itself to be just as wise and just as effective in politics as it has ever been at the domestic hearth. Craft is craft, whatever its fortuitous mode of display. Wherever and whenever women have been permitted to invade new fields of chicanery, they have at once demonstrated their capacity. I need only refer, for examples, to the fields of spiritualism, novel-writing, press-agenting and mental healing. here they are now the full peers of men—and once they launch into politics they will quickly exhibit the same equality there. The notion that politics is a recondite and esoteric science, requiring extraordinary gifts for its comprehension, is a silly delusion, to be blasted by five minutes’ talk with any politician. All it really demands is a reasonable alertness and craftiness—and these are the very qualities which all women possess.

So much for the political fitness of the dear girls. Let us consider tomorrow, in greater detail, the objection that their admitted physical inferiority would prevent them enforcing their own laws.