Baltimore Evening Sun (5 June 1913): 6.

A long-handled aluminum collection plate to the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis, winskinski of the Lord’s Day Alliance, for any evidence that the employment of bands in religious processions on Sundays would increase public disorder in Baltimore, or further the ruination of working girls.

Under the somewhat vapid title of “The Rehabilitation of the Republican Party,” the Hon. J. M. Vale contributed to yesterday’s Evening Sun a straightforward and impressive argument for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The time has passed, he believes, for defending that amendment on sentimental and patriotic grounds. We have seen it at work for nearly 60 years, and we know it for what it is. It has been, from the very start, a source of bitter hatreds and disorders, an obstacle to the sound progress of the negro, a nourisher of crooked and degraded politicians, a potent agent of national disgrace and degeneration. It would be difficult, indeed, to imagine a piece of organic law less intelligently adapted to its ostensible purpose, or more productive of uncivilised and intolerable abuses. It is perfect proof that there were plenty of political Munyons before Roosevelt, just as there were heroes before Agamemnon.

But is the time quite ripe for repealing this grotesque error of the step-fathers, this masterpiece of bosh? For one, I doubt it. The objection to the Fifteenth Amendment is not that the men it enfranchises have black skins, but that the great majority of them are ignorant, stupid, corrupt and half-savage. In other words, the objection to it is that it is grounded upon the doctrine that every specimen of the Homo sapiens is actually, or at least potentially, sapient—that the lowest negro differs only in degree, and not at all in kind, from Galileo and Huxley. This doctrine, in the opinion of most reflective men, is unsound and monstrous. But why, after all, should we abandon it before we have fairly tried it? Why should we begin to lop off the legs of democracy before we have actually tested it on the track? Why disfranchise the negro man before we have trusted the vote to the white woman?

Certainly, there is infinite absurdity in a political theory which holds it to be unjust to disfranchise the negro on the ground that he is not white, and yet holds it to be just to disfranchise the white woman on the ground that she is not a man. The one law denounces and repeals a purely physical test; the other sets up and ratifies a purely physical test. Why not destroy all such tests, whatever their precise character, and so abandon finally the notion that voting is a physical function? Why not start all over again, and from the standpoint that the franchise is a thing the citizen must earn by his ability and his industry, and not a more tertiary sexual character?

This is what we must come to soon or late, if civilization is to be rescued from the mob. But the time, I believe, is not yet. Before we may begin to edit and denaturize democracy, we must first give democracy a fair trial, and it has not yet had that fair trial. So far as I know, there is not a single State of the Union in which universal suffrage actually prevails, nor even one in which universal manhood suffrage prevails. In every one of them some class or other of citizens is forbidden the polls for some reason not founded upon individual wrong-doing or deficiency, and in all save a few of them the whole female sex is deprived by law of a right which lies at the bottom of all other rights of a freeman. Until this last injustice is rectified, until democracy is actually put into effect in the United States, it will be absurd to talk of turning our backs upon it. That which has never been the law cannot be repealed.

But in the long run, of course, after we have given the vote to everybody, there will have to be a thorough overhauling of the whole scheme, and the natural leadership of the alert and intelligent minority will have to be restored to it. All human progress, not only in the practical arts, but also in government, religion and virtue, originates in this minority and is promoted by it. The great masses of the people are against all change, and in particular, they are against all those varieties of change which involve risk and sacrifice—i. e., the most radical and valuable. Their proper function is to execute the ideas of their betters. It is highly dangerous to let them manufacture ideas themselves.

But the validity and value of a human being’s ideas are not determined by pigmentation, nor even by sex. There are good negroes and bad negroes, wise women and foolish women; and even if it be established that the majority of negroes are bad, or that the majority of women are foolish, the absurdity of the current tests remains. The badness of a bad negro is not a function of his color, for a white man may be just as bad. And so with the foolishness of a foolish woman: it is more than matched by the foolishness of many a man whose right to vote goes unchallenged—for example, the Hon. Dashing Harry. Away, then, with all such physical standards and criteria. Let us say, simply, that the intelligent and self-respecting shall have a voice in the government of the State, and that the unintelligent and degraded shall not—and then let us say no more. A black Lincoln would be just as much a Lincoln as Abe himself, and a Pasteur in skirts would still be worth hearing and heeding. But the average white ward heeler is no more like Lincoln than the average black ward heeler. Both lack utterly all the special qualities which made old Abraham what he was.

Next Saturday’s Municipal Journal will contain portraits of all the Sunday-school superintendents holding jobs under the old-fashioned administration, together with affecting accounts of their theological exploits and dizzy feats of moral derring-do. The old-fashioned superintendents run no less than five separate Sunday-schools, and have 147 teachers subordinate to them. It is estimated that nearly 3,000 little children are being instructed in the lofty principles of baltimorality under their direction. During the last 10 years these great matadors of virtue have taken the scalps of seven clergyman hostile to them, and have scared nine others into prudent silence. Such are the rewards of moral merit!

Standing of the clubs in the National Tuberculosis League for the week ended May 10:

Boston.......................417 Cleveland.........................321 New York.................385 St. Louis...........................305
Chicago....................370 Pittsburgh.........................280 Baltimore.................322

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