Baltimore Evening Sun (18 December 1912): 6.

Polite note from the business manager of the Maryland Suffrage News:

Whatever your opinions, at least we owe you a debt of gratitude for advertising our paper so well. The Suffrage News has been selling like hot cakes all week.’

Don’t mention it; it was a pleasure to oblige. I only wish that it were possible to put the Suffrage News before every voter in Maryland, every week in the year. Such propagandist papers suffer by the fact that they are read almost exclusively by persons who are already converted. True enough, this reading serves to keep up the enthusiasm of the converts, but it would be much more pleasant to harangue and ensnare the unregenerate. One sinner saved is worth a hundred of the pious entertained.

Unluckily enough, my eagerness to help in the present case is qualified by a fear that well-meant aid might do more harm than good. That is to say, I am afraid that the Suffrage News, if generally read in Maryland, would put a killing blight upon the suffrage cause. I am myself a convinced suffragist, and formerly argued for the dear girls and their attendant boys with enormous rage and eloquence, but since I have been reading the Suffrage News my enthusiasm has cooled. If the present leaders of the jehad are so silly and extravagant as evangelists, what reason is there for believing that they would show more sense as politicians? That is the question which haunts and daunts me, and I have reason for believing that other theoretical advocates of the suffrage are oppressed by it in the same way.

I hope I am not unjust to these fair rhetoricians. In the conduct of all good causes, of course, it is sometimes necessary to howl and make faces. I myself do it in advocating alcohol, that slandered boon to suffering man. And all other propagandists yield occasionally to the temptation. It is a commonplace of rabble-rousing. But the authors of the Suffrage News show a gift for exaggeration and wind music which vastly exceeds this normal habit, and day by day they grow worse. Would it be safe to transform such ridiculous utopians and extremists into political bosses? I doubt it, and doubting it, I withdraw my subscription of $3,000 a year to the cause.

Enthusiasm has its limits, and when it passes those limits it becomes sheer nonsense. Of such sort is the enthusiasm of the local suffragette leaders for their own sagacity and their pet panaceas. They believe in Law, that idol of the defectively reflective. They propose to make the world perfect by statute. They have a legal remedy thought out for every human evil, and they propose to enforce that remedy by a piling up of penalties. In brief, they show plainly that they cannot differentiate between an effect and a cause, and so it seems to me that it would be highly dangerous to give them political power in the State, and expose the whole population to their stupidities and their rages.

But this objection, it may be argued, applies only to certain leaders, and is no argument against granting women the vote. The fact remains, however, that these leaders would undoubtedly set up shop as bosses the moment the vote was granted, and that the apathy of the average woman would probably enable them to exert a very real power. As for me, I prefer the bosses that we now have, for whatever you may say against them, they are at least not impossibilists. Compare, for example, the Hon. Sonny Mahon and Dr. Donald R. Hooker. In education, of course, Dr. Hooker is vastly Sonny’s superior, but I think you will have a hard job proving that he is as judicious and sensible a man.

After an armistice of 10 days, the Towel resumed firing with its 19-inch tallow mortars this morning, and one of the first shells took the August Customer full in the chest. It arrived just in time to plug up a wound made by the Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton, a somewhat belligerent friar of these parts. The Rev. Dr. Straton, it appears, lately aspired to address the Customer on the subject of the automobile tax, but was frozen at firstly by a glance of disdain. Hence his hurling of a javelin. But, as I have said, the Towel’s benign artillery got into action in time, and so the Customer suffered nothing worse than a mild sting.

Many citizens stopped on the street to watch the gun practice. The Towel’s great 36-inch rifle, Dr. Munyon, is still out of commission, but the tallow mortars and cocoa-butter quick-firers did excellent service. Incidentally, a shell from one of the latter caught the Hon. Dan Loden in the gills and sent him down for the count, and two tallow shells collided with the person of the Hon. Jacobus Hook, K. T.

Books that your pastor will appreciate as Christmas presents:

“Spiritual Surgery,” by the Rev. Dr. Oliver Huckel. “Yvonne,” by the Rev. Dr. L. M. Zimmerman. “The White Slave Trade in America,” by O. Edward Janney.

Books that will make appropriate gifts for your dear old grandmother:

“In Other Words,” by Franklin P. Adams. “Knocking the Neighbors,” by George Ade.

Books to give to your family doctor at Christmas:

“Human Physiology and Hygiene,” by Prof. Dr. John Turner, Jr. “How to Wake the Solar Plexus,” by Elizabeth Towne.

Soothing remark of the estimable Sunpaper:

City Collector Hook is now sure of his commission of one-half of 1 per cent. for the collection of State taxes in the city.

Would that the members of the Concord Club were as sure of their chairs!

Tips for the Maryland Antivivisection Society, the mushy, the moribund:

The paupers at Bayview are to be bathed again on March 12. The Johns Hopkins Medical School is offering the boys of Northeast Baltimore $2 apiece for live sealions and $3 for walruses.

Extract from Chapter XLVII of “Following the Equator,” by the late Samuel Langhorne Clemena, Litt. D.:

The joy of killing! The joy of seeing killing done! * * * We white people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization; Thugs who long ago enjoyed the slaughter of the Roman arena, and later the burning of doubtful Christians by authentic Christians in the public squares,. and who now, with the Thugs of Spain, * * * flock to enjoy the blood and misery of the bullring.

Respectfully referred to those suffragettes who have ratified the Vice Program of the estimable Maryland Suffrage News.