Baltimore Evening Sun (21 January 1913): 6.

What the Hon. E. A. Thompson mistakes for factory smoke is the acrid vapor from the cigars that the Hon. Jacobus Hook gives away. What he mistakes for the aroma of canneries and steel plants is the heavy scent of burning rope. No wonder good Jacobus is his sworn and insatiable foe.

Advertisement from the estimable Sunpaper of yesterday morning:

WANTED--MAN WHO THOROUGHLY UNDERSTANDS THE RENDERING OF TALLOW, BOTH WITH PRESSURE AND JACKETED TANKS. Must be familiar with the yield of fats and the operation of crackling presses. One who has had packing house experience and is capable of taking full charge. No others need apply. Address O 850 Sun office. J20-2t

Can it be that the Municipal Journal is going to increase its staff?

The Hon. Cole L. Blease, the South Carolina super-Mahon, is favoring the stoneheads of his State Legislature with messages describing eloquently the newspaper conspiracy against him. Thus great statesmen imitate and learn from one another, and are afflicted by the same plagues and pestilences. Blease, alas, suffers more than most. He has no Hot Towel to grease and massage him. He has no Calvin W. Hendrick to assure the Baraca classes of his virtue. He has no Paving Bob to be grateful to him. He has no Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough to write his State papers. He has no Calvert Bank to comfort and sustain him.

From the Inquiry Column of the Evening Sunpaper:

Bachelors are useful only to sit at club windows and wager what sort of a collar the next man who comes down the street will wear.

An appalling example of the growing ignorance of newspapers, of the evil substitution of mere words for facts. The truth is, of course, that all human progress is, and always has been, dependent upon bachelors. They have done the heaviest fighting of the world, and what is more, they have done the heaviest thinking. Turn to any useful field of human endeavor and you will find that its greatest virtuoso is a bachelor.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the greatest musician that ever lived, passed his whole life as a solo a capella. True enough, he made love to various women, but that was mere politeness: he was a courteous, humane fellow. Immannel Kant, the greatest of modern philosophers, was a bachelor in both theory and practice: the very sight of a woman made him run. Arthur Schopenhauer, his great successor, hated the sex so fiercely that he wrote an essay arguing that no woman could ever tell the truth. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the dominant philosopher of today, lived and died in celibacy. Herbert Spencer, dying at 83, had never kissed a woman, nor even shaken hands with one. Walt Whitman was a bachelor. So were Mendelssohn, Schubert, Turgenieff, Walter Pater, Rabelais, Spinoza, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Washington Irving, Parnell, Clyde Fitch and John Millington Synge.

Turn to our own time. Field Marshal Viscount Kitchener, of Khartoum, the greatest living soldier, is a bachelor. So is Sir E. Ray Lankester, the greatest living British scientist. So is Remy de Gourmont, the great French poet and critic. So is Antonio Scotti, the greatest living operatic actor. So is William Gillette. So is James Huneker, the foremost American critic. So is Dr. Alexis Carrel, who lately won the Nobel prize. So is John Galsworthy. So is Postmaster-General Hitchcock. So is John Barrett, chief of the Bureau of American Republics. So is George Ade.

Here in Baltimore our foremost man of science is Dr. William H. Welch, a bachelor. The man who has given Baltimore an art gallery famous all over the world is Henry Walters, another bachelor. The best Mayor that Baltimore has ever had is Thomas G. Hayes, a third bachelor. The man who led the long fight for good government here was Severn Teacke Wallis, a fourth bachelor. The one true philosopher of Baltimore’s whole history was Richard M. Venable, a fifth bachelor. The recognized arbiter of polite society in our midst is William F. Lucas, Jr., a sixth bachelor. The best of all our public officials is the Hon. Robert J. MclCuen, a seventh bachelor. Our best Governor since the war was the Hon. Austin L. Crothers, an eighth bachelor.

And so it goes. I could stretch out the list to 200 columns. The leaders in all the arts and sciences are always bachelors. Wifeless men do the thinking of the world and are its chief heroes and benefactors. Even when it appears that a great man has been married it is usually found that he is divorced or that he beats his wife. August Strindberg, the greatest Swede since Swedenborg, divorced three of them and hated them all. William Shakespeare was forced into an unwilling marriage, and deserted his wife as soon as he was able. Napoleon I divorced his first wife and detested his second. Dickens, Bret Harte, Carlyle, Ruskin, Berlioz and Wagner were on bad terms with their wives. And Tschaikovsky, when married but two weeks, kissed his good-by.

The Hon. Jacobus Hook’s assiduous greasing of the Hon. the Archangel Harry would seem to be very profitable to his fellow stockholders in the Old Town National Bank. The city deposit in this bank, at last accounts, was equal to 32½ per cent. of the total paid in capital of the bank, and is more than 27 per cent. of the combined capital and surplus. Only the super-Mahon’s Calvert Bank, with a deposit $43,363.66 greater than its total capital, and but $1,636.34 less than its combined capital and surplus, fared any better. In most of the big banks of the city, the city deposit came to no more than 3 or 4 per cent. of the combined capital and surplus.

But it must be said to Colonel Hook’s credit that money actually in his custody is not deposited in the Old Town Blank. What he collects from the taxpayers does not begin to earn private dividends for him until after he has transferred it to the City Register. While he has it in his own care he deposits it in other banks, thus showing a squeamishness rare in the City Hall. The Hon. Richard Gwinn, City Register, seems to be afflicted by no such qualms. The money he holds in trust on account of property sold for taxes is all deposited in the Calvert Bank, which both he and the super-Mahon serve as vice-presidents. It is small in amount, true enough, but every little helps.

For the thirty-seventh time in less than two years the Job Hounds of the City Council strapped the Hon. Augustus Cæsar Binswanger to their operating table last night and cut off his head with a rip saw. Gus must be pretty dead by now. Nevertheless, his ghost occasionally takes a licentious constitutional and is heard to snicker. For example, on the fatal evening of July 2, 1912. For instance, on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November.