Baltimore Evening Sun (10 April 1913): 6.

Circulation of The Evening Sun on the day the Archangel Harry was inaugurated by the jobhounds: 34,001.

Circulation of The Evening Sun on the day the Archangel Harry “carried” the State for the Hob. Young Gorman: 36,436.

Circulation of The Evening Sun on the day after the day the Archangel Harry was “unanimously” nominated for the Vice-Presidency: 39,405.

Circulation of The Evening Sun on the day the Archangel Harry’s Light street bridge scheme was done to death by scoundrels: 40,154.

Circulation of The Evening Sun yesterday: 43,239.

For U. S. Senator [by direct election] The Hon. Henry E. Schoenewelf.

The ratification of the constitutional amendment providing for the direct election of Senators strikes one more blow at the prerogatives and profits of the State Legislatures. In the palmy days, now unhappily no more, a Senatorial fight was worth from $50,000 to $500,000 to a Legislature. Here in Maryland, a cheap State, the price ran low, but out in the West it seldom dropped below six figures, and on more than one occasion it climbed close to $1,000,000. But now that ancient and honorable graft is scotched. The Senatorial candidate of the future will have to deal directly with the voters.

This is only one symptom, alas, of a wasting disease that is fast reducing the Legislatures to a state of pitiful senility. One by one their old perquisites and usufructs are being taken from them. Nearly every State, for example, now has a Public Utilities Commission, with complete power over the public service corporations, and so the old-time bellringers cease to ring. It is now practically impossible, here in Maryland, for the Legislature to shake down the Gas Company—a thing done regularly in the old days, to the joy of all concerned. The United Railways is not worth 10 cents a session: even the City Council can’t get to it any more. And the railroads, once so juicy and tempting, now bear the aspect, to the baffled legislator, of dry and decrepit prunes.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away! The sun do move! Time was when a ward heeler sent to the Legislature from Baltimore city was sure to return with enough money to open a saloon. But no more. If any money is made at Annapolis hereafter it will have to be by blackmailing the orphan asylums and one-horse hospitals which reach out so eagerly for the public funds. The old grafts have sunk into the sere and yellow leaf. The old-time lobbyists are selling life insurance or working on the street cars. The old-time statesmen flee from a legislative nomination as from the sneaking, Levantine pestilence. The Garden of Allah, seen by cold daylight, is now observed to be an alkaline and forbidding plain.

A virtuous reform, to be sure. A laudable revolution. But, after all, are its fruits all sweet? Is there no stray lemon among the apples? Alack, I fear there is—and not only one, but at least two. Will the Seventeenth Amendment actually purge the Senate of plutocrats? Will the voters prove more resistent to cash than the Legislatures? To come to Maryland again, is there any reason for believing that the average voter is less eager for the mazuma, or less willing to see virtue in its benevolent distributer, than the average legislator? And supposing the answers to all these questions to be such as to caress the pious, what assurance have we that the resultant deadhead Senators will be richer in actual talent than the paid admissions of yesteryear?

No assurance whatever! On the contrary, we have a pretty sure promise that the plain people, once they begin choosing Senators according to the best of their knowledge and belief, will quickly flood the Senate with the worst bunch of mountebanks and rabble-rousers ever assembled under one tent. The process, in fact, has already begun. The Western States, pioneers of the direct primary, have rooted out all their plutocrats and sent boy orators as substitutes. The upper house is now rapidly filling up with Progressives of the extreme left—local optionists, pursuers of white slaves, initiators and referendors, baiters of the judiciary, preachers of perunas, Chautauqua tear-squeezers, clowns and contortionists of all imaginable sorts. For the first time in history, a professional vice crusader is a member of the United States Senate!

And the effect upon the Legislature will probably be as lamentable as the effect upon the Senate. Once the old grafts are all knocked out, the men who sought election in the palmy days will keep out, and so the way will open for the reformers and utopians. Instead of auction sales and bellringers we shall have tournaments of idiotic lawmaking, with each quack battling valiantly for his own panacea, and public order handed over to the devil. All the sorrows of the world will be tackled seriatim. New and more preposterous messiahs will arise daily. The business of government, in the end, will become a sort of wild debauch, with each professor ringing his legs in the air and bringing down his heels upon the hard, flinty caput of some other professor.

Such is the present prospect, unless all signs fail and the prognostications of the prophets go for naught. Does it please you, messieurs? To go back to the Senate, would you rather be governed by the men of which Hoar and Aldrich were typical, or by the men of which Bourne and Kenyon are types? You have to hire some one, remember, to govern you: you can’t do it yourself. Which do you prefer: to be governed by your superiors or to be governed by your inferiors?

Literary note from the arduous and accomplished Hot Towel:

Col. Jacob W. Hook, City Collector, is going to write a book. The volume will consist of a biography of the Colonel’s life.

This recalls certain past masterpieces of the Towel. For example: “Suicide Kills Himself.” Again, there was the super-Mahon’s virtuous bellow on Wednesday: “The entire blame for the accident belongs almost entirely to Grasty and his paper!” But this last was not manufactured in the Towel office: the super-Mahon wrote it himself. That is to say, it was written for him by the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough, his head greaser and amanuensis.