Baltimore Evening Sun (26 August 1912): 6.

From the dope sheets of the Old-Fashioned Administration:

Well, well, maybe I haven’t got the complete returns. If so, it is up to the Hot Towel to print them. Besides the seven, who? Let’s hear their names.

Remark of the Hon. Charles J. Ogle, secretary of the Maryland Tax Reform Association:

You assume that each man’s reward is now determined by his merit, plus his cunning and his daring. William Waldorf Astor, now a naturalised Englishman, draws some $9,000,000 a year from the rent of his land in New York city. What a tremendous amount of cunning and daring he must possess!

Loud cheers by the Single Taxers! Cries of “Poke him, Charlie!” And yet, if the Hon. Mr. Ogle will but put aside the Hon. Mr. Astor as an individual, and consider him for a moment or two as a member of a class, he will have to admit, I daresay, that the said class has plenty of cunning and daring, and even a bit of merit. The class war, let it be remembered, is not a combat between individuals on the one side and a whole class on the other, but one between classes on both sides. A single member of the master class may lack almost entirely the typical virtues of his class, just as a single member of the slave class may lack almost entirely the typical vices of his. And yet, by the accident of birth or some other such chance, he may be able to claim indubitable membership in that master class, reaping all of its benefits and bearing all of its burdens. I do not allege that this is just; I merely allege that it is so. As I have before explained, I myself did not make the world, nor do I argue that it is perfect. All I say about it is that it is.

Viewing, then, this combat between master and slave as a combat, not of stray individuals, but of solid and self-conscious classes, it must be obvious that the masters have both cunning and daring, and that their exercise of these qualities is so intelligent that it must be reckoned a merit. In numbers they are in a hopeless minority. If the slave class rose against them tomorrow they would be swept into the sea in two days. Every bit of property they own is held, not by strength, but by craft. The slaves want it badly and could get it at once if they had the courage to grab it—but they haven’t the courage. The masters are too much for them. They are constantly bluffed and jockeyed off the board. With might on their side (and, according to the Hon. Mr. Ogle, right, too) they are paralyzed and defeated by superior cunning and daring.

Is such cunning meritorious? I rather suspect that it is. Any quality which enables a man to survive in the world is meritorious. A race which abandoned that struggle, a race which connived at its own defeat and extinction, would be a race accursed and absurd. Every healthy man, like every healthy protozoon, senses this by instinct. Above all his other yearnings is his yearning to remain alive. That yearning is neither moral nor immoral; it is merely natural. What is more, it is just as natural in the master as in the slave. What is still more, it is just as meritorious, if merit means value. What difference is there between this Hon. Mr. Astor’s effort to hold on to his property and some other man’s effort to get it from him? I can see none. If there is any, let the Hon. Mr. Ogle point it out.

Standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League for the week ended August 3:

This from the Public Health Reports, a scurrilous sheet published weekly by the degenerate United States Public Health Service, formerly the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service. Let the Archangel Harry get after it and murder it, as he has so often murdered the villianous Sunpaper.

That booming and bogus virtue which is probably the chief characteristic of the American people was never more beautifully exhibited than in the current yawping about the Standard Oil Company’s contribution to the Roosevelt campaign fund. The Rockefellers and Archbold, honestly fearing that the election of Bryan would hurt their business, gave $125,000 to help elect Roosevelt. Therefore, they are scoundrels unspeakable—and Roosevelt himself is another scoundrel unspeakable—and Senator Penrose, who handled the money, is still another. But Mr. John Smith, who gave $2 to the Bryan fund in the belief that the election of Bryan would mean a lower tariff, and that a lower tariff would save money for him, Smith—this Mr. Smith is revered today as a heaven-kissing patriot, a sweet altruist, a noble and manly fellow.

So goes the buncombe! The niggero who votes the Republican ticket on the ground that the Republican party freed his grandfather is a semi-human brute, too loathsome to be allowed to vote at all. But the white man who votes the Democratic ticket on the ground that his grandfather fought in the Confederate army—this great logician is to be venerated as one almost too pure and lofty for so vile a world. The harder the niggero sticks to his idols, the more patent it is that he should be disfranchised. But the harder the white man sticks to his, the more worthy he is of public trust and respect, the more he shines with virtue, the more he deserves a job.

The betting odds at Westport, as shown on the City Hall ticker:

20 to 1 that them ex-Sheriffs got away with every cent. 40 to 1 that Bob Padgett comes baek.

Beware of telephone repairmen, dog-catchers of the S. P. C. A. and fumigators of the Health Department! Burns has been one and all!

Don’t accept the invitations of strange lodges! Burns belongs to all orders!

Forgotten carcasses in the boneyard of boomery:

The Star-Spangled Banner Exposition. The Chesapeake bridge. The anti-Harry charter.

From the estimable London Financial News:

The German tallow naarket * * * shows a sudden upward tendency.

Can it be that good Jacobus is combining business with pleasure?

And before voting for the municipal ownership of factory sites, just consider for a moment what the Hon. the super-Mahon has done with the municipal ownership of the Tax Department.