Baltimore Evening Sun (28 March 1913): 6.

Only 778 days more! And if the fates are kind, only 341 days more!

The super-Mahon’s strange reluctance to heave his hat into the Senatorial arena is giving pause and disquiet to all true connoisseurs of courage. The hon. gent., in the past, has laid great stress upon his possession of that quality. He has represented himself, indeed, to be the most valiant human being of modern times, with no care for man or devil. He has praised his own truculence even more than he has praised his own brains. And what is more, he has set his whole force of greasers and pediculidæ to the same eloquent task, so that his daring in battle has passed into a proverb. But now, alas, he hems and haws. Now he shows prudence and cold sweat. Now he tempers the hot wine of valor with the chilled seltzer of discretion.

Can it be that the hon. gent. is actually afraid? Can it be that he trembles kittenishly when he thinks of that open ring, that blatant spotlight, that rude exposure to the elements? One begins to fear so, and fearing so, one wonders just what it is that the hon. gent. is afraid of. Does he have a premonition of public objurgation, of a hall of dead cats, of cruel doings by a posse comitatus? Or can it be that he is merely in dread of the Sunpaper, that licentious old ruffian, that archaic carcass, that intransigent ancient--the immoral old Sunpaper that he has so often murdered in the past?

If so, then let him stay his tremors. The Sunpaper will not hurt him: I promise it on my faith. It has othor and more appetizing fish to fry. It will be busy, for six months to come, proving the orthodoxy of the Hon. William Luke Marbury. It will be busy extending its circulation to the uttermost recesses of the domestic hearth. It will be busy receiving the advertisements of those alert merchants who know and esteem a first-rate family journal when they see it. It will be engaged, in brief, in a multitude of humane and fascinating duties, and so it will have no time, even supposing it to possess the cruelty, to do psychic mayhems upon so brilliant a creature.

No, beloved, do not fear the Sunpaper. It will not hurt you. And if, by any vagary of senile rage, it forgets its proper business and essays to do so--if it turns donkeyishly from chasing subscribers to reviling a pure and worthy hero--then I hereby agree and engage to haul it off. I know enough about the Sunpaper to hang it. I have accurate blueprints and radiographs of all the skeletons in its closet. The moment it hurls a stone, you will hear the warning knocking together of osseous knees, the low, ghoulish rattle of calcareous ribs, the snap, snap, snap of jaws long still. Don’t be afraid of the Sunpaper. It won’t do no harm.

How prohibition has dealt with Birmingham, Ala., as described by a traveling Baltimorean:

Birmingham, as you probably know, has cast off the yoke of prohibition, and no one need go thirsty today, but during the so-called dry period the city’s business suffered severely, and many fierce enmities were started by the searching of houses for liquor. The people, becoming exasperated, put an end in these searches, and finally overthrew prohibition altogether. But its effects still remain. While it was in force, blind tigers sprang up, literally by the thousands, and many of them yett remain. There are now about 150 licensed saloons, but the blind tigers greatly outnumber them still. It is difficult to eradicate these places, once they get a start. When they are raided, their proprietors move to other locations. Birmingham has about 500 of them.

The estimable Democratic Telegram, the super-Mahon’s false whiskers, denounces Congress bitterly for daring to consider a woman’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The passage of such an amendment, it argues, would be an intolerable invasion of State’s rights. Bosh, my dear! The passage of such an amendment would be no more than an extension of Article IV, Section 4, which provides that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.” The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were attempts to extend that article, but they didn’t go far enough. No sovereign State can be called a republic which denies the vote to one-half of its citizens.

Before a woman’s suffrage amendment can become part of the Constitution it will have to be passed by two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, and ratified by three-fourths of the Slate Legislatures. In other words, it will have to be approved, roughly speaking, by three-fourths of all the present voters of the United States. Certainly such a majority should command respect and still the carping voice. Most of the laws which now pester and torture us represent the opinion of no more than 51 per cent. of the voters. Among them are laws which invade and destroy the common rights of peaceful citizens--for example, the snoutish and intolerable Blue Laws of Maryland. But an amendment providing for woman’s suffrage would invade no man’s rights. All it would do would be to restore and safeguard the rights that are now unjustly withheld from women.

The Hon. Walter L. Denny, having been canned unjustly for frequenting the den of the Sunpaper, a crime of which he is innocent, could do worse than commit it in retaliation. We have no liquor license, true enough, but seldom a day passes that some country subscriber doesn’t send in a jug of prime applejack--and Col. Jacobus Hook keeps the whole staff supplied with excellent and colytic cigars. From 11:30 to 12.30 a buffet lunch is served in the composing room, the ham sandwiches being the best in Christendom. And distinguished visitors may have the gruesome pleasure of reading their obituaries in the office morgue.

From the Sunpaper’s report of yesterday’s trial of Stuffer No. 1:

A motion for a new trial was made by the attorneys * * * who said that if the motion is not granted the case will go to the Court of Appeals again. Wagner was released on $1,000 bail.

And so on ad infinitum. The trial of a case on its merits is a mere preliminary jousting, a somewhat tedious overture to the actual drama. The question before a court of law in Maryland is no longer whether the accused did it or didn’t do it. Of vastly more importance is the question whether all of the subtle points of legal etiquette and ceremony have been observed.

Boil your drinking water! Typhoid will get you anyhow—but do it to be polite!

The Hon. MM. Wilbur F. Coyle, Max Ways, Jacobus Hook and Henry Edward Warner will appear at the Concord Club’s bal masque as the Seven Sutherland Sisters.—Adv.