"Snoot"

To open staid, conservative news organs and find the nose of the King-Emperor repeatedly referred to as a "snoot" has given Londoners a delicious, titillating thrill of sacrilege these many months. The sacrilege was last week not only permissible but even laudable because the London press was exulting at the slap administered by Chicago voters, to their blatantly anti-British Mayor, William Hale Thompson (see p. 11). Since Mayor Thompson invented and began the game of calling the nose of George V a snoot, the dignified and conservative London Morning Post permitted itself to gloat, last week: "Evidently the self-respect of Chicago has tired of being made a byword and laughingstock by its present Mayor. It has told him in effect that it is his own snoot rather than King George's that needs to be kept out of the city. But though notice has been served of dismissal, yet, for some months the world may still hope to be entertained by the antics and extravagances of the champion buffoon whose ambition, like that of Dogberry, seems to be 'Write me down an ass.' "

Meanwhile the Liberal Star expressed "amazement at the orgy of violence which marked Chicago's municipal elections," and the blatant Daily Mail gave the impression that every Chicagoan who voted did so in imminent peril of being bombed. Even factual Times cried emotionally that "in Chicago every man's hand seems to be raised against his fellow and the preponderating mass of law-abiding citizens is almost powerless to check the orgy of violence."

Finally the Conservative Daily Telegraph ably summed up London's reaction to Chicago thus: "Scenes like these have never occurred in Europe within the mem ory of the living, and couldn't possibly occur. We are looking at a social organization which has united the riches and luxury of the most modern civilization with the manners and customs of particularly disorderly mining camps."