Baltimore Evening Sun (31 March 1913): 6.

The boomers! The boomers! Such jinks you never seen! Oh, give me one more cigarette, and pass the old caffeine!

The uproar over the appointment of the Hon. Henry E. Schoenewolf as a Senate doorkeeper makes admirable entertainment for these lazy spring days, but it is not otherwise of importance. The job to which the Hon. Mr. Schoenewolf has been gazetted is a purely mental one, and there is no evidence that he is unfitted to discharge its duties properly. In truth, he seems to have an equipment above the average, for his long service behind the bar must have given him a courtly manner on the one hand and a ready courage on the other. Arm him with a bung-starter or an ice-pick and he will undoubtedly keep good order in the Senate gallery--and that is precisely what he will be paid to do. He has not been hired to serve as a moral example, nor even as a horrible example, to the visitors who people the place.

The Hon. William H. Anderson’s discovery that the hon. gent’s appointment by the Hon. John Walter Smith is “a direct bid for the liquor and vice votes and support” is one of the banal discoveries that moralists are always making. What else, indeed, could it be, if not a direct bid for the liquor vote? And why in the world should John Walter scorn that vote? He would be glad enough, I dare say, to receive the suffrages of the drys--but the drys, led by the Hon. Mr. Anderson, have denounced him as an immoralist and refused formally to support him. Is it any wonder that he now turns to the wets? I think not. He is not a professor of Chautauquan ethics, but a candidate for the United States Senate, and certainly he is within his rights when he seeks votes wherever he can find them. If the drys want to save him from the wets, then let them promise to vote for him themselves.

As for the Hon. Mr. Schoenewolf himself, there is no evidence, as I have said, that he is unequal to the duties of his modest post. What is more, there is no evidence that he will do dishonor, as a man and a citizen, to the exalted body he serves. The United States Senate cannot afford to throw stones at reformed kaifkeepers. It has given shelter, in the past, to polygamists, bribers and patent medicine manufacturers, and its high seats will probably be occupied, in the near future, by the most amazing collection of political fakes and mountebanks ever assembled under one roof.

We are all overlooking the effect of the direct primary upon the upper house. In the past, whatever their private crimes, its members at least showed a certain degree of civilization. Most of them, true enough, paid cash for their seats, but at all events they were gentlemen. They wore the clothes of gentlemen, they used the speech of gentlemen, they displayed the personal dignity of gentlemen. But the direct primary is now fast filling the Senate with a horde of boy orators, perunists, rabble-rousers, snide moralists and promoted ward heelers. A seat there is now open to any politician, however ignorant, however preposterous. The talents which send a man to the place of Hoar and Morgan, Root and Lodge, are the talents which make a man a hero to the chandala.

Don’t be too eager, dear hearts, to revile the Hon. Mr. Schoenewolf, whose present conduct seems to be beyond reproach, whatever his errors in the past. If you rob him of his lowly job in the gallery, you may send him to the floor. If you arouse too much sympathy for him, you may make him a Senator. He is constitutionally eligible, he has powerful backing, and his own skill at primary elections to only equaled by his skill at evading the liquor laws.

Psychological discoveries of the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough, chief serpent to the super-Mahon, as revealed in the current issue of the Municipal Journal:

No man likes to feel that he is carrying a part of somebody else’s burden. Taxes never evoke gladsome songs under the most favorable circumstances. Every man who escapes the payment of a tax dollar shifts that dollar to someone else’s shoulders. To overvalue the little man’s property or to undervalue the big man’s property is a flagrant breach of common fairness. Very few citizens walk up boldly with a full schedule of their property, and volunteer information as to its real value. Everybody is willing to see his neighbor assessed to the full measure of his possessions. A large measure of public heartburnings ia produced by imagination. Where actual knowledge is lacking, the imagination runs riot. The easiest way to stop the tongue of discontent is to demonstrate by facts that no reason for discontent exists. Suspicions of partiality make people mad.

Let me direct the attention of all persons who have been deceived by the late gabble about the virtue of shop girls to read an article by the Rev. Henry Woods, S. J., in the issue of America for March 29. Father Woods’ discourse is very brief, but it is uncommonly sagacious and penetrating. Among other things it offers an effective answer to the new moral theory that every American woman has her price. It goes straight to the real causes of prostitution, as opposed to the theoretical and romantic causes, and completely disposes of the pious balderdash of professional woman-hunters, self-consecrated archangels and political mountebanks.

The effect of prohibition upon the Southern negro, as described by a traveling Baltimorean:

I just heard of a new one. The darkies in the dry towns buy laudanum or paregoric at the groceries, mix the stuff with water, and use it as a beverage. You can imagine the effect.

The betting odds at Back River, as reported by the Lord’s Day Alliance:

Four to 1 that the Hon. William H. Anderson wriggles out of it with a whole hide.

The boomers! The boomers! They’re having lots of fun! And so are all the suffragettes, and so is Anderson!

Now comes the Hon. Horrible Harold, editor and chief scorpion of the Towson Union News, with the accusation that the complimentary letter from the Hon. Joseph A. Phipps, of Govans, printed with such unconcealed satisfaction by the Sunpaper the other day, was really a piece of spoofing. According to Harold, no such person as the Hon. Joseph A. Phipps exists. Furthermore–

The real writer of the letter states to the Union News that it was 99 44-100 per cent. pure sarcasm and was instigated by the fact that the writer had sent the Sun [paper] three Letters to the Editor, not one of which had seen the light of day.

Harold doesn’t give the name of this humorist, and so I am glad to supply it. He was the Hon. Joshua Frederick Cockey Talbott.