Baltimore Evening Sun (6 November 1912): 6.

And of all the sad words you ever seen, the saddest is “Wait till 1916.”

Sagacious remarks of the Republican organization leaders, as reported by the tearful Towel:

It is all over.--The Hon. John B. Hanna. The results speak for themselves.--The Hon. Wm. F. Stone. Our national candidate has lost.--The Hon. John J. Hanson.

All the same, what them Old Town Merchants done to Jake ain’t hardly nothing searcely to what the stoneheads done to poor Harry.--Adv.

Bitter cry of the Hon. Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough:

All is lost, including honor!

Exhausted by his triumph, the Hon. the super-Mahon is spending the day playing duets for violin and concertina with the Hon. S. S. Field, LL. D.--Adv.

Standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League, for the week ended October 12:

Again in the first column, but with two clubs still ahead! The Orioles, alas, seem to have lost form. The old days of easy triumph have gone hurtling down the dim corridors of time.

Impression produced by the estimable Hot Towel of this morning:

’Twas caviare to the General.

Explanation of the Hon. S. S. Field, L.L. D., translated into American for the benefit of the vulgar:

Well, I can’t say I am disappointed none. Way last January I went to work and told Harry he would make a mistake if he done it, and now just look what’s happpened to him. You can’t get nobody to lay no taxes on himself. If you was to go to work and let the people vote on good roads you would see them turn it down. The way they hang on to a dollar a body can’t hardly believe. But I ain’t got no regrets. I have been for Bryan ever since 1896, and if I can’t get Bryan then I take off my hat to Woodrow.

Meanwhile it would be interesting if the Archangel Harry would go before the City Club and tell the members how the conduit loan managed to escape--with the immoral Sunpaper in favor of it. Again, huccum the sewer rents to be slaughtered--with the villainous Sunpaper agin them? Certainly, the plain people wait for an explanation.

Once a child gets burnt once, it won’t hardly never stick its hand in no fire no more.

All the local honors yesterday went to the Hon. D. Bachrach and the Hon. Fred. Wright, those insatiable enemies to Virtue in Office. Amateurs in politics, they boldly tackled the professionals commanded by the Archangel Harry--and achieved the usual easy victory. The truth is, of course, that amateurs always win, so long as the fight is fair. The theory that professional politicians are subtle campaigners, that they have any super-potent method of converting intelligent people, is the silliest poppycock. Their two effective weapons are jobs and “the window.” For the rest, they must put their whole trust in the fact that, in ordinary campaigns, few persons save their slaves and lickspittles show any positive interest. When such interest is aroused–as, for instance, by the impassioned rhetoric and obvious honesty of the Hon. MM. Wright and Bachrach--the politicians are always beaten so badly that their plight becomes truly pathetic.

The main value of a reputation for virtue is that it allays suspicion.

The Hot Towel of this morning, in its comment upon yesterday’s debauch, strikes the true note when it expresses the hope that Woodrow will not be bound by “the loose political philosophies that unfortunately play such a prominent part in * * * the campaign.” That campaign brought forth more quakery and balderdash than any other contest since Jackson’s day, with the sole exception, perhaps, of the memorable first battle of the Hon. William Jennings Bryan. Both the Democratic orators and the rabble-rousers of the Bull Moose had an enormous armamentarium of panaceas on tap, and both Woodrow and Theodore were inclined to give those panaceas copious and even frenzied approval.

No sane man, of course, can blame them. It is impossible for any candidate to poll a large popular vote in the United States without yielding hospitably to the emotions and delusions of the moment. The chief officers of State are chosen in this country, not for their promise of achievement, but for their promise of impossibilities. Our political thinking, in brief, is done emotionally, and not at all intellectually, and the man most apt to succeed is that man who comes closest to guaranteeing, as a reality of tomorrow, the vague and romantic dream of today. So don’t blame Woodrow for his sudden and somewhat disconcerting capacity for conversion. He had to be converted, dramatically and at wholesale, as an essential condition of being elected.

But now that he is duly elected he will probably find the inquest a good deal less stimulating than the murder. On the one hand, his training and his common sense will begin to revolt against the fallacies which took on such a lovely glamor during the campaign, and on the other hand, he will soon be face to face with the staggering problem of carrying out his guarantees. Will he make any more actual progress against the trusts that Theodore made, or even than the Hon. Mr. Taft? We shall see. And will he actually reduce the high cost of living? Again we shall see.

Personally, I am convinced that the dear man has a Herculean job on his hands. The people, by deft suggestion, have been led to view him as a statesman of almost messianic proportions. He is the Moses foreordained to lead them out of the house of the bondage. He is the expert appointed to solve all their problems. He is the candy kid. Well, let us hope that he really is. But let us not envy him the job of proving. it. Along about the winter of 1915-16 the plain people will begin to regard him in the past tense. They will search the land for the carcasses of trusts; they will observe the price of rump steak; they will be ripe for that reaction which always follows hope. And when that time comes, if I make no mistake, Woodrow will find himself in the midst of a campaign a good deal more strenuous and a good deal less exhilarating than that he has just brought to a close.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Heave a cobble at Lieutenant Becker!

Thanks to the scoundrelism of Congress, the virtuous Hot Towel is now marking every Adv. Adv.–Adv.