Baltimore Evening Sun (4 November 1912): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

The more faster you go, the more sooner you don’t get there.

Portrait of the three-cornered battle between the Hon. Satan Anderson, the Hon. Bob Crain and the Hon. Gene Chafin, the Wet Hope:

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And the more Harry whoops for Woodrow, the more he whoops for a Johns Hopkins man! Let the band play “Funiculi-Funicula.”

What has become, by the way, of the Dickey committee to “investigate” South American trade? Answer: it has appointed a subcommittee to arrange another banquet. At the banquet another committee will be appointed, and a week later it will appoint another subcommittee. Then the subcommittee will ask for bids on a banquet.

Problem in baltimorality: If it was virtuous to give an amateur vaudeville entertainment at the Lyric yesterday afternon before an audience of children, why would it be a crime to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?

Extracts from the Hon. S. S. Field’s closing argument for the sewer rentals, in the accommodating Hot Towel of this morning:

Examine these figures carefully. The water rents, it appears, reduce the tax rate by 32 cents, and the sewer rents would make a reduction of “about three-quarters” that amount. What is three-quarters of 32? I make it 24 cents. But the Hon. Mr. Field, immersed in the supermahonic mathematic, clings desperately and intransigeantly to the theory that it is 30.

A small thing, of course, and yet a fair example of the absurd juggling of figures that has been going on since the beginning of the rental campaign. Instead of being frank with the voters, and telling them exactly how much the adoption or rejection of the rental plan will affect the tax rate, the harrific spell-binders have confined themselves almost exclusively to parading bugaboos and discharging balderdash.

Personally, I am in favor or a direct charge for the use of the sewers. But is the present administration to be intrusted with the management of so complex a matter? I doubt it. The present administration, in all its dealings with the capital problem of taxation, has made its chief appeal, not to the common sense and well being of the people, but to their ignorance and prejudice., Deliberately dedicating itself to the doctrine that cities prosper by false pretenses, it has given earnest of its conviction by bringing bogus evidence and a childish sophistry to support that doctrine.

Are the majority of voters in Baltimore gullible asses? The Archangel Harry and his flatterers seem to be convinced that they are. Wednesday morning we shall know.

VOTE FOR THE SEWER RENTAL PLAN!

I am in favor of the sewer rental plan for several reasons. One of those reasons is that I shall have the collection of the rentals, and that will mean an increase in my clerical force * * * and more place for competent Democrats of the Nineteenth ward.--The Hon. Daniel Joseph Loden.

The unspeakable Democratic Telegram, for all my pleadings and exhortations, clings hunkerously to its doctrine that the Hon. S. S. Field, LL. D., is not an authentic Hon. What is worse, it abandons all pretense of supporting that doctrine by the orderly processes of logic, and proceeds frankly to bellowing and reviling. It therefore becomes my solemn duty, in accordance with warnings hitherto and full often given, to pronounce upon it, in due form of law, the major and minor anathemas, the grand maranatha of the first class, the ultimate and flabbergasting curse. Accordingly, I mount the rostrum, put on the black cap, pull out the stop marked vox celeste, and begin in awful tones.

May the Telegram, for its crimes, suffer all horrible penalties and retributions. May the foreman, charged with campaign usquebaughs and such like toxic juices, pie the first page and the editorial page ten weeks running! May the paste of the editor get into his ink, and the ink into his cough syrup! May the office devil clog the Washington hand-press with chewing gum, foot sticks and his mortal remains! May the dead ads all sneak into the forms and the live ads all stay out! May the office roaches, drunk with power, fall upon the next Old Subscriber who happens in and devour him gluttonously and instanter, like the seven-year locusts of Mesopotamia! May suffragettes invade and devastate the office! May the whole staff be doomed forever to smoke the raucous, homicidal cigarros of the Hon. Jacobus Hook! May snakes pursue fiendishly the foreman of the ad. alley, and send him leaping and screaming from the eighth-story window, a five-column cut of the Hon. James Harry Preston under his arm!

All this--and more! May the ink freeze on press day! May the column rules warp into unearthly elipses abd epicycloids and go bouncing down the composing room! May the stereotypers rout out the eyes of the Hon. Woodrow Wilson and make a shambles of the ears of the Hon. Charles Linthicum! May burglars steal all the cap Hs in all fonts of body type! May scoundrelly copy boys smear every imposing stone with mince pie! May the linotypes all jam simultaneously, and while the machinist is off for a day’s fishing! May every stockholder come in ten times a day with ten boosts of his friends and ten roasts of his enemies! May Wegg, Levin T. Jones and the Arlington Heracleites begin to send in letters! May Satan Anderson challenge the editor to a public debate!

There! The dirty job is over, and I am glad to have it off my mind. But these last astounding penalties of the lex non scripta were coming to the Telegram. It has denied the Hon. S. S. Field his rights too long. It has carried too far this cruel persecution of a pure spirit. Let it now repent, kiss the dust and ask for mercy.