Baltimore Evening Sun (8 August 1912): 6.

The estimable Maryland Suffrage News continues the benign work of reducing the suffrage crusade in Maryland to the dimensions of a tea fight. Some of its editorials this week: “On Dodos,” “The Wedding Guests,” “The Bull and the Cow.” The controversy over the pulchritude of one of the suffragetted lags, but in place of it there arises a hot debate over the question, whether it is ladylike to march in parades. Thus the dear girls wallop one another and the cause itself is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of anemia. Who will be the first to start a real fight for equal suffrage in Maryland–a fight upon the actual issues and not upon trivial side issues—a fight uncontaminated by spats over millinery, cosmetics and etiquette? As a convinced suffragist of 42 years’ standing I yearn for that hero to arise. We have had enough jousting with hatpins and powder-puffs. Let us have some genuine slugging. Let us make some real progress.

First thing you know some smart Aleck’ll hire Burns to smell out the lynching of Van Sickle.

Apparently genuine inquiry from an estimable reader:

Who Is this Geheimrat Turner you constantly quote? Is he a brother to Uncle Pilduzer, Freezer Fry and the other Frankensteins of the Bentztown Bard? And if he really exists, do you quote him correctly ?

Of course I quote him correctly and of course he exists! And not only exists, but also adorns the trade and art of medicine and enchants the world in general with his sagacity. Here is the title page of his great work, “The Physiology of the Human Body and Hygiene,” the most original book ever written:

illustration

This book now grows rare. Those who own it venerate and cherish it. But now and then, by death or burglary, a stray copy gets to the second-hand bookstores and may be had for 60 cents. It is of racy and astounding marvels all compact. There is more novelty in one chapter of it than in the whole works of Martin and Foster. It is a revolutionary and epoch-making tome, the rage and arcanum of all progressive physiologists. And I always quote it verbatim et literatim. No human being could improve upon it.

As for who Geheimrat Turner is, the title page of his magnum opus gives the main facts. In addition, it may be said that he was surgeon-in-chief to the late Democratic National Convention and that he is at present consulting laparotomist and visiting anesthetist to the Loch Raven Water Works, by appointment of the Hon. the super-Mahon, an old friend and great admirer. Finally, he is the inventor of bovotherapy, or the treatment of disease by chewing raw meat—perhaps the greatest single contribution made to medical science since the invention of malicious animal magnetism. Bovotherapy is still opposed by the hunkerous rascals of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, but it to nevertheless making great progress in the world, and articles praising it have lately appeared in the War Cry, the Hot Towel, the Zeitschrift fuer Narrheit and other medical journals.

Meanwhile, it is pleasant to know that two such great men as Geheimrat Turner and the Hon. the super-Mahon, the one supreme in physiology and the other in statecraft, know and esteem each other. The geheimrat, it is said, got the suggestion for bovotherapy through a chance meeting with the super-Mahon on the night of July 2 last, and the super-Mahon consults the geheimrat upon all problems affecting the public health. The friction and coalescence of two such powerful minds must needs work for the welfare of all of us. With snide politics in front of us and bovotherapy behind us, we can’t help being happy.

Say what you will against Harry, he don’t go around tallowin’ nobody none.

The Hon. Charles J. Ogle, secretary of the Maryland Tax Reform Association, in the course of a Single Tax letter to The Evening Sun of Tuesday:

Think it over, Brother Mencken—that is to say, think it over.

Well, I have been doing it, good Charles, and I am still up a stump. What I can’t get quite clear is this:

1. Is there any reason to believe that the persons who are hopeless inefficients under the present system would cease to be hopeless inefficients under the Single Tax? In other words, is their inefficiency merely external, or is it really internal?

2. Supposing that the Single Tax could lift the penalties now weighing upon such inefficients and at the same time diminish the present rewards of the efficient, would that work for human progress? If so, how?

I ask these questions in perfect good faith. Perhaps the Hon. Mr. Ogle may be induced to deal with them in a series of brief but illuminattng communications to The Evening Sun.

With Burns doin’ business here, them stuffers don’t feel so lonesome as what they usen’t.

Official announcement of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association:

The slum is unknown in Baltimore.

Which somehow recalls the super-Mahon’s theory that the Democratic National Convention tried to flatter him on the night of July 2.