Baltimore Evening Sun (21 February 1912): 6.

Only 38 days more of bad English and worse whisky at Annapolis! Go ahead, gents! We are getting used to it!

From an article in Public Ownership, the local Socialist weekly:

Baltimore’s Sundays are as cyanotic as the face of a hanged murderer.

And an copiously boozy as a Democratic National Convention.

Remark by Passed Assistant Surgeon L. L. Lumsden, of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service:

Any community * * * that has a death rate from typhoid fever of more than 10 persons in every 100,000 per annum should be ashamed of itself.

What is Baltimore’s record? Let us seek it in the annual reports of the Department of Health. From 1901 to 1910, inclusive, there were 1,910 deaths from typhoid in the city, or an average of 191 a year. And during the same period the average population of Baltimore was 535,000. That works out to 35.7 deaths per 100,000 per annum–or nearly 4 times Dr. Lumsden’s maximum.

Dr. Howard A. Kelly’s protest against the grafting technique of the Salvation Army is very earnest., but somewhat belated. If I make no mistake, the same harsh things were said by Thomas Henry Huxley 30 years ago. And yet the Army spellbinders are always able to beat up a weeping audience, and what is more, to shake that audience down.

Boil your drinking water! Root for Harry! Swat the fly! Shampoo the little dears with kerosene! Fly a Clean-City flag from the ash heap in your alley!

Which recalls the fact that good old McMains to taking a darn long while to materialize his gaseous allopaths.

New diseases lately discovered by the scoundrelly anti-Harrys of the Johns Hopkins Medical School:

Lachryomania—An irresistible impulse to shed tears. Finneyphobia—The fear of intelligent men. Trippesis—A form of surgical shock produced by tackling the Hon. William H. Anderson; psychic electrolysis.

And forget not lizaphobia, or the fear of the colored sister, a neurosis from which many bilious foes of the extension of the suffrage now flutter. No doubt you are familiar with the arguments put forward by these persons, for they have broken into the papers a number of times lately. What they try to establish is that the colored women of Maryland, if given the ballot, would vote as a unit, and so make good government impossible.

But this argument, I fear, does not bear close inspection. Even admitting its premises to be sound, its conclusion by no means follows. That the colored lady-voters would probably stand together, as the gentlemen-voters of their darkling tint have always stood together–this we may safely grant. But that such standing together would work against good government is not so certain.

The truth is that the fidelity of the blackamoors of Maryland to the Republican party has done us a great deal more good than harm. Its net effect, disregarding surface effects, has been to set a solid Republican herd in opposition to a solid Democratic herd, thus wiping out the one with the other. In Baltimore city, for example, there are about 17,260 registered colored voters, and of this number but 16,000 may be trusted to vote the Republican ticket under any and all circumstances. Well, on the Democratic side you will find a white army, almost exactly equal in numbers, of the very same sort of osseocaputs. This army is made up of absolutely unintelligent men—i. e., of men who may be trusted to vote the straight party ticket under any and all circumstances.

Thus the votes of the stalwarts on the one side kill the votes of the stalwarts on the other side. And that puts the actual determination of elections into the hands of the 80,000 or 95,000 voters who stand measurably above such dog-like fidelity. I do not say that all of these foot-loose voters reach the uppermost heights of political intelligence. As a matter of fact, fully 90 per cent. of them are weak enough to be led astray, now and then, by bellowing and balderdash. But they are at least appreciably better than the members of the chandala caste—that is to say, than the irreconcilably “regular” rabble behind the ward leaders. Nine times out of ten, perhaps, they may be led by the nose, but the tenth time they rise in rebellion and knock out the job-brokers and rabble-rousers. The swine beneath never rebel. That is precisely what makes them swine.

Obviously, it is an advantage to have these human wallowers divided into two herds, approximately equal in numbers, for the opposition of the two herds has the effect of counteracting the evil potentialities of both. Here we come upon ono of the few sound objections to the disfranchisement of the blackamoor–I mean to the blackamoor as such, and on the simple ground of his blackness. What would happen, let us ask, it he were so disenfranchised in Baltimore city? Simply this: that the 16,000 white swine of the other party, whose votes are now wiped out by the votes of the 16,000 moors, would become active and dangerous factors in every election. And these white swine, it must be plain, are no more fit to exercise the franchise than their black opponents. They are, one and all, human blanks—and so we gain something when we set other blanks in opposition to them, and make their votes count for nothing.

In the same way the colored sister might serve a useful purpose. If all the woman in Baltimore were enfranchised tomorrow, they would quickly fall, no doubt, into the classes which now separate the men voters. That is to say, there would be a chandals class of “organization women” at the bottom, and various superior classes above them. Well, would any damage be done if this class of “organization women” were opposed by a corresponding herd of niggero women? None that I can see. The effect would simply be to throw the determination of elections upon the higher classes–a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Not that the enfranchisement of the colored sister, in itself, would be a good thing. On the contrary, it would be a bad thing. But the enfranchisement of the ignorant and vicious white woman would be just as bad. And if one class were enfranchised and not the other, then an offense would be committed against civilization. To give the vote to the ignorant white woman and not to the ignorant colored woman would be just as bad as to give it to the latter and not to the former.

And one of the tales untold is that of a gentleman who committed lafolletticide at a certain recent dinner in W———n.