Baltimore Evening Sun (3 June 1913): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

Some kind friend calls my attention to the fact that Dr. Graham Taylor, of Chicago, whom I praised extravagantly the other day for denouncing the Hon. Barratt O’Hara’s political vice crusade, is an enemy to segregation, and that when Dr. Guy L. Hunner brought him into court as a witness three or four months ago I denied his authority and called him names. An inspection of the records shows that this charge is true, and so there is nothing for me to do but plead guilty and go to jail. If I could think of any plausible defense I’d offer it, but the fact is that none occurs to me.

Boil your drinking water! Watch Bob come back! Look out for prohibition! Swat the fly!

From the favorable report of the City Council’s joint standing Committee on Ways and Means, on the ordinance of estimates for 1913, submitted to the Council December 6, 1912:

The committee understands, as to the appropriation of $5,000 for a so-called Municipal Journal, that such journal shall contain only statements of the proceedings of the departments of the city goverument without comment, and they are of the opinion that before such publication is made a supplementary ordinance defining the exact nature of such publication and fixing the responsibility therefor shall be passed.

No such supplementary ordinance was passed, despite the fact that all the members of the Committee on Ways and Means signed the report. Three days later the minority in the committee submitted an additional minority report, in part, as follows:

There is very grave doubt whether there is any power under the general powers of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore in the Charter to authorize the issuance of a municipal publication. New York is expressly authorized by its charter, and issues a daily paper, in which it saves money by advertising the reports of its boards and all municipal legislation. * * * There is no authority for this [Baltimore] publication, nor is there any sense in it, and the city will be in hot water explaining and censoring the matter appearing therein, as well as face a large expenditure of public money. Its sponsors should go to Annapolis and get some law for it.

No notice was taken of this minority protest nor of the conditions laid down by the committee as a whole, but in the first number of the Journal, issued January 17, there appeared a salutatory by Mayor Preston, in which the specific promise was made that the Journal would neither “decry, criticize or praise,” and that its accounts of “the vast work of the municipality” would be “succinct, impartial and sincere.”

Has this promise been kept? It has not. The Muniopal Journal has been chiefly devoted, since its second number, to the ardent and unrestrained greasing of the Hon. Mr. Preston. The leading editorial each week—usually a whole page—has been a magnificent and blubbering pæan in his praise, and if not that, a donkeyish denunciation of his mysterious “enemies.” A few examples:

And so on and so on. Just what it costs the city to print this stuff is not quite clear. By the ordinance of estimates for 1913, the Municipal Factory Site Commission was given $5,000 to carry on the Journal for one year, but it seems probable that this money is all going toward the printer’s bill, and that salaries and other expenses are otherwise provided. The Hon. A. S. Goldsborough, editor of the Journal, is carried on the rolls as secretary of the Factory Site Commission, and that commission is supported by money transferred from the contingent fund. The duties of the commission’s secretary, of course, are next to nothing: the commission itself is a joke. During the loan campaign, last fall the Hon. Mr. Goldsborough devoted his whole time to sending out circulars to improvement associations and voters, defending the loan plans that were later defeated so decisively at the polls. Whatever his ostensible office, his actual job is that of press agent of the Hon. Mr. Preston, and one of his principal duties, as holder of that job, is to fill the Municipal Journal with the sort of gush that the Hon. Mr. Preston feeds upon.

In other words, the conditions imposed by the Council upon the conduct of the Journal, through its adoption of the Ways and Means Committee’s report of December 6, have been systematically violated since the first issue. So long ago as January 27 Mr. Binswanger proposed to the First Branch that the attention of the Second Branch be called to this violation, and that joint action be taken against it, but the administration job-hounds at once came to the rescue, and the Binswanger motion was laid on the table. Meanwhile, the taxpayers pay an uncertain sum, probably nearer $200 than $100 a week, for the circulation of the Hon. Mr. Goldsborough’s turgid flattery of his boss.

The wiskinskis of the Domesday Book, having finished with the honorary pallbearers, leading lawyers and prominent restaurateurs, now turn their attention to brewery collectors, vice crusaders, bank presidents and the judiciary. The price is the same to one and all alike: $100 cash for a whole page and $50 for half a page. Pikers can get quarter pages for $25 apiece, but such peanut trade is not encouraged. The first draft of the history of the Hon. Dashing Harry has been completed by the Hon. Bob Lee, and all that remains is for the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough to grease it up a bit. It will cover eight pages and will be illustrated with portraits of the Hon. Champ Clark and the Hon. Lon Miles.

Zanesville (Ohio) dispatch in the estimable Cleveland Leader:

Hugo, the 2-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. James Schultz, choked to death last night on a coffee bean.

Respectfully referred, etc., to the Hon., etc., etc.

Renewed and continued felicitations to the Hon. Young Cochran. There is something to the man. He has a punch.—Adv.

Boil your drinking water! Watch Bob come back! Send your little innocents to Sunday- school! Swat the fly!

According to the Philadelphia Press, the “quarantine” of the Quaker City Tenderloin has already caused the suicide of seven women. Say what you will against it, vice crusading is a darn sight better sport than rabbit-hunting.—Adv.