Baltimore Evening Sun (2 January 1914): 6.

The Hon. William H. Anderson arrived in New York yesterday in the middle of the afternoon, carrying nothing but a toothbrush, a change of medicated flannels and a copy of Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest.” This morning the New York papers give nearly six columns to him. Such is science!

A DAILY THOUGHT. Si ceux, qui sont ennemis des divertissements honnêtes, avaient la direction du monde, ila voudraient ôter le printemps et la jeunesse.—Honoré Balzac.

Apparently permanent status of the Salvarsan Fund of the Maryland Society for Social Hygiene:

Statistical summary of the annual I report of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association:

Boil your drinking water! Vote for the Hon. Isaac Lobe Straus! Watch Anderson come back!

Solemn asseveration by a suffragette In today’s Letter Column:

We are not anti man; in fact, we are for man.

In the same sense, no doubt, that the chivalry of Chestertown was “for” the two Moors rescued by Dr. Goldsborough.

The Hon. Sydney Brooks, in Harper’s Weekly:

I cannot persuade myself that the average New Yorker really likes to be governed by men of refinement, independent means and superior social position. At a time of strong moral excitement he may vote for them, and even elect them to office, but he quickly wearies of their air of aloofness, exaggerates their detachment from the “plain people,” and comes in the end to resent their presence and activity as a sort of affront to democracy.

The Hon. Mr. Brooks is a foreigner, and too politic, I suppose, to tell the whole truth. It is quite true, as he indicates, that the American people seldom, if ever, re-elect an honest and intelligent municipal official, but it is not true that any Socialistic “class consciousness” is responsible for their habit. The reformers who occasionally get into office in this country are seldom men of wealth and social position. The Hon. Brand Whitlock, who has just been turned out by the aroused yeomen of Toledo, came from a small country town and had to make his own way in the world. The Hon. Rudolph Blankenburg, doomed to the slaughter in Philadelphia, is a German immigrant, and though he is said to be well-to-do, he is certainly of no social prominence. And the Hon. Thomas G. Hayes, who carried only five Baltimore wards in the primary of 1903, after four years of splendid service as Mayor, was (at that time, at least) neither rich, aristocratic nor refined. In the case of the Hon. Mr. Hayes, indeed, he was actually rejected in favor of a man who lay open to all the objections the Hon. Mr. Brooks mentions.

But if it is not because they are haughty patricians that our municipal reformers are always so promptly canned, why is it? The answer is simple enough: it is because they are honest men. The American people have a bilious distrust of the honest man in office. This is not because they regard him as a hypocrite, for often the honesty of his honesty, as it were, is transparent, but because they regard him as a fool. Consciously or unconsciously, they say to him what Rita Allmers said to her arctic husband: “There stands your champahne on the table—and you refuse to drink!” In brief, they can’t understand the process of mind whereby a man in office devotes his whole time and thought to the public service, without any regard to his private interest. They feel that a man who practices such a suicidal vice must be feeble-minded, and so they heave him to the lions.

I have mentioned the Hon. Thomas Hayes. At the risk of taking unwarranted liberties with the name of a man who deserves the very highest respect, let me use him to illustrate my point again. Before he became Mayor of Baltimire—i. e., when he appeared to the common people as nothing more than a reformer eager for a job—he was a man of great influence. He was constantly consulted about public problems, and one blast upon his bugle horn was worth a thousand men. No other public man of the day, indeed, was held in greater estimation. But the moment he got into office and began to practice the honesty that he had preached, all his influence vanished. When, after four years, his term expired, he entered at once into the densest political obscurity imaginable, and not even the newspapers showed any further interest in him.

Why? Simply because the American people, at bottom, have no genuine respect for the Hayes type of man. The sort of reformer they are faithful to is the frankly bogus sort—that is, the type of Dashing Harry, of Roosevelt, of Honey Fitz—the reformer who looks out very sharply for No. 1, the while he fills the air with loud music. To the skirts of such a mountebank they will cling, generally speaking, forever. They understand him, venerate him and have a fellow feeling for him, His course in office is exactly the course that they themselves would pursue if they were in his boots. In brief, he is typically American.

The president of the Equal Franchise League on the Annapolis hike of the Just Government League:

The women who would hike to Annapolis, or anywhere else, for that matter, are simply seeking a cheap notoriety, which can do the cause of woman suffrage no good.

And another thing which can do the cause of no suffrage no good is the suffragists’ habit of breaking into the newspapers with attacks upon one another. The more the legislators hear about the petty spats between the two suffrage organizations, the less likely they will be to pay serious heed to either. What the suffrage cause most needs in Maryland is an abandonment of kaffeeklatsch methods, and an intelligent, well-tempered and unanimous statement of the sound reasons for giving women the vote.

Advice to Baltimore kaif-keepers: Look out for the local option bill! Don’t fancy that the flight of Anderson has finished it. It is still a very tempting bell-ringer. Be prepared to loosen up!