Baltimore Evening Sun (9 April 1913): 6.

What a City Councilman was spoiled when John Walter made the Hon. Henry E. Schoenewolf a Senate doorkeeper!

AD AQUAE POTORES

A miracle of love divine Changed all the water into wine; Save me from miracles of men Who want to change it back again! –Herman Merivale.

The learned Sunpaper makes a great pother over the fact that the Mon. MM. Sonny Mahon, Paving Bob Padgett and Frank Kelly attend constantly at the Mayor’s office in the City Hall, enriching the Hon. the super-Mahon with their counsel, helping him to merchant jobs, easing his sorrows with their kaif-wit and goose grease. All this strikes the Sunpaper as crude, scandalous and damnable. It longs for the good old days when the Hon. I. Freeman Rasin kept close to his lair in the Law Building and sent all orders to the City Hall by the Hon. George Lewis, his camerlengo and spiritual adviser. This elder technique, I take it, has the Sunpaper’s hearty approval, or at least its grudging toleration. It believes that the Mayor of Baltimore should avoid all direct discourse with such gentry as destructive to his dignity.

Nevertheless, there are probably plenty of Baltimoreans, and some of them men of considerable virtue, who hold that the present plan is measurably better than the old one. Does it reveal that the super-Mahon is a frank job-dealer, openly trading public offices for his own advantage? Well, what sane man has ever denied that he does these things? Does it take all dignity from him, and reduce him to the level of a pothouse politician? Well, when did he ever have any dignity to lose? Does it exalt the Hon. MM. Mahon, Padgett and Kelly above the Mayor, and make them appear as the real rulers of this town? Well, who would be ass enough to maintain that they are not?

The truth is, of course, that the only difference between this plan and the old one is a difference in favor of the former. It is more honest, more courageous, more decent. It gives an appreciable substance to that valor of which the super-Mahon is ever bawling, and of which his greasers bawl dutifully when he is out of breath. It shows that he is on the level even in his political chicaneries—that he is willing to take the consequences of his acts. It may offend the pious to see him engaged in open conference with his masters, but certainly the spectacle is no more offensive, at bottom, than that of a Mayor taking orders through a ward heeler from a boss too autocratic to visit him personally. Latrobe, Davidson, Hodges and the rest of them thus took orders from Rasin—and tried to conceal it. The super-Mahon takes orders from Mahon, Padgett and Kelly—and admits it. Give me the super-Mahon!

It is possible, of course, to imagine a state of affairs more soothing to the virtuous mind than this—a state of affairs revolving around a Mayor determined to put the public business above his own political reachings and sweatings. Such a state of affairs, indeed, is not only imaginable, but even historically of record. During the administration of the Hon. Thomas G. Hayes, for example, no orders from the Hon. Mr. Rasin were received at the City Hall. Other politicians, true enough, had access to the Mayor’s ear, but they came as suppliants and not his own boss. What is more, he was also the boss of various other persons. His one aim was to give Baltimore good government, and though he often failed in detail, his general success was so great that it cost him his job.

But the Hon. the super-Mahon is not a Hayes, either in principles or in practice. The platform on which he stands, indeed, is opposed to the Hayes platform in every plank. He went before the voters of Baltimore with a definite promise in his mouth, and that promise was that he would commit none of the Hayesean crimes, that he would oppose the Hayes theory of city government with all his might, that he would blow up the merit system and hand over all the spoils of office to those who helped him into power, that he would make the City Hall a full trough for his followers and pediculidæ. This promise he has carried out to the letter, with all the scrupulosity of an honorable man. He has not failed the honest fellows who labored for him and voted for him. He has made visible and real their revolt against Hayesism and against all its attendant oppressions of the chandala. He has rid the City Hall of the abhorrent Johns Hopkins influence and of all other such deviltries and pestilences.

The hon. gent. has thus made good his pledges. And he has made them good in the open light of day, with the good red sun beating down. True enough, he has occasionally attempted a piece of private legerdemain in the dark—for example, his little service to the Calvert Bank, i. e., to his own privy purse. But the great majority of his official acts, particularly in the job department and in the field of political contracting, have been open and aboveboard. He has consulted with political brokers and swineherds in the sight of all. He has frankly sought to improve his own political fortunes. He has not attempted any concealment or evasion. He has played the game according to the rules laid down by the patriots who elected him, and he deserves credit for that good sportsmanship, and not blame.

Between the super-Mahon type of politician and the Latrobe-Hodges-Davidson type of politician, all the odds are in favor of the former. The people of Baltimore run no risk of being. deceived about the super-Mahon. He does not train with the reformers on the one hand, and deal with the bosses on the other. He is frankly a spoilsman, in politics for his own benefit, and he not only admits it freely, but even insists upon it. That this type of statesman is the highest type, I do not profess to maintain, but one thing, at least, must be evident: it is far from the worst type. If the super-Mahon does Baltimore any essential damage, the fault will rest wholly upon the people. They elected him knowing exactly what he would do, and if they elect him again they will have absolute assurance that he will keep on doing it. His fate is entirely in their hands, and so is the fate of the political philosophy he preaches and practices.

The Concord Club has put in four multigraphs for signing the Harry petition.—Adv.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Join the Anti-Cigarette League!