Baltimore Evening Sun (5 August 1912): 6.

Revolting details from the baltimoral Sunpaper’s account of high crimes and deviltries at Back River yesterday:

Soon the band, consisting of eight players, appeared and began a ragtime march. No one paid any attention to the music. * * Losing players would hurry away to the pavilion, where beer would be hastily ordered and drunk. Their weakening nerve strengthened, they would rush back to take one more chance. * Eight octagon wooden blocks with numbers on each side were placed in a box, shaken up and poured out. * *

Rice beer for shattered nerves! Welcome to oryzatherapy! So soon is Turner’s bovotherapy outrivalled, superseded. Welcome, too, to octagonal dice! Exit the old-fashioned hexahedral kind. And three cheers for the vulgarians who close their ears to ragtime!

Autobiographical gloom of the Hon. James Edward Hare, in the Labor Leader:

What is fame! An empty bubble! Gold! A transient, shining trouble!

Cheer up, Ned! At all events, we are still beautiful!

One of my spies, who has wormed himself into the confidence of the Hon. Bob Lee, camerlengo to the super-Mahon, tells me that the super-Mahon’s first annual message, which will go to the House of Mirth tonight, will be very hot stuff, indeed. I hear, among other things, that the immoral Sunpaper is to be murdered again. This will make the seventh time that Harry will have plunged his poniard into the giblets of the Sunpaper, which will leave it but two more lives. I also hear that a whole chapter will be devoted to the Crime of July 2, and that affidavits will be presented showing how the Hon. Satan Anderson packed the galleries with Baraca classes trained to hiss in the key of G major, and how the scoundrelly Sunpaper bribed 200 liquorish delegates to discharge predigested witticisms at the Hon. Lon Miles. Accompanying the message will be wood-cuts and biographies of the Hon. Bob Padgett, Geheimrat Prof. Dr. John Turner, Jr., the Hon. Jacobus Hook and the Hon. John J. Mahon, Jr., the new aide-de-camp to the super-Mahon.

Notice is hereby given that if the City Council attempts to strike from the message any passage that may refer unfavorably to The Evening Sun or to dilute the bile of any such reference by resolutions of praise, the attorney of The Evening Sun staff will at once apply for a writ of habeas corpus and so rescue this newspaper from that insult and disgrace.

Don’t miss tomorrow’s Hot Towel. Wagons laden with tallow were backed up at South and Baltimore streets all day today. In addition, a carboy of witch hazel came by automobile.

Say what you will against the witch hazel used by the Towel, it hasn’t half so many staphylococci in it as the witch hazel used by Baltimore barbers.

The betting odds in the Eutaw street poker-rooms, as reported by the police:

7 to 1 that old Doc Wilson begs Harry to take a Cabinet job. 700 to 1 that Harry takes it.

If the super-Mahon gives the word, old Doc Wilson will sweep the State by 10,000 majority. If the super-Mahon doesn’t give the word, the Doc will sweep the State by 25,000.

Surgeon: the man that the family doctor blames it on.

Honors fall thickly upon Baltimore. On Friday, the Hon. George Konig was Speaker of the House of Representatives, and on July 2 another Baltimorean came awfully near being Vice-President.

Further contributions to the thesaurus of American synonyms for money:

That Georgian who bawls against a Federal judge on the ground that he is “dilatory and dictatorial” and has kept one case in litigation for 13 years is a contumacious and scandalous fellow and should taste the corrective bastinado. It is no part of a judge’s duty to hurry litigation. On the contrary, he is put on the bench to draw it out, to attenuate it, to polish its crudities, to make it recondite and lovely. If laymen had their way, jurisprudence would be as simple and as vulgar a science as penuchle. Cases would be decided in two days and upon their mere surface merits. Here is where judges earn their pay. It is their function to plunge deeper, to probe, to explore, to reveal the finer nuances, to invent and nourish complications; above all, to delay. A judge who lets a cause in equity slip by him in less than a year is a marplot, an anarchist and a traitor to his profession. A judge who decides any point at issue, however trivial, in less than six months is a numbskull and a scoundrel and deserves hanging in chains.

Bilious reflections of the Hon. Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu, in the “Esprit des Lois,” tom. VIII, cap. 2 (1748):

The principle of democracy is corrupted, not only when the idea of equality is lost, but also when the idea of extreme equality has developed, and each one wishes to be equal to those he has chosen to command him. Under such circumstances the people, impatient of the power they have confided, wish to do everything themselves, deliberate for the Senate, execute for the magistrates and rob all the judges of their power.

Final contribution to the directory of intolerable pests:

Sensible remark of the Hon. Edward Hirsch in the Labor Leader:

When a man wants a drink * * * he will have it, all the laws in the country to the contrary notwithstanding. He will find the means and place to get it, and all the police in Christendom won’t stop him.

Padgett the contractor may have his ups and downs, but Padgett the ex-sheriff don’t need to bother none.

Sagacious sayings of the Geheimrat Prof. Dr. Turner, Jr., originator of bovotherapy, author of “The Physiology of the Human Body and Hygiene,” and confidential medical tipster to the super-Mahon:

Never breathe the breath of the sick, for they expire considerable quantities of diseased poisonous principals which you may contract. (Page 230.) One of our best pilots was a blind man who got his bearings from the taste of the bottom which clung to the lead used. (Page 280.)

Objections to the estimable Evening Sunpaper:

1. It collects money for sentimental charities.
2. It is too all-fired moral.