﻿T-BONE SLIM DISCUSSES WASHINGTON, MD., AND DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 
 
“Let us approach our destinction.’ opines our sawing pardner—you see, it had been previously agreed between us that we would visit the capital of Alaska, Hawaia, Phillipines. Long Island and Lake Michigan etc., making our journeyfication a matter of predestination, pure if not simple. . . 
And so we ankled our way democratically, demidoggedly a down the thoroughfare, bearing to the right where we had glimpsed the location of Washington monument on a lesser prominence. . . Night comes. I miss my Chicago. Ah ha! Another day. St. Patrick’s, to be exact. 
Today we will visit the statues of military men. The town seems to be fairly well supplied with them: 
I loaded my old reliable corncob pipe at the feet of Brig. Gen. Pulaski, a fiery Polander on horseback, and then I was ready for the day’s ordeal. 
Pretty much all the monuments are for military men—which proves the risky nature of their occupation; insofar as the hero’s are pictured full of pep in the prime of life. . . 
I am wondering why there is no monument depicting the horney handed son of toil tossing a shower of sweat—something like a fountain or a perpetual sprinkler, if you know what I mean. 
Few of the dead ones were on their feet. Rawlins was on hard footing with a pair of binoculars (been-occulars) in his hand, looking ‘s if the ship had been sunk under him. 
Dan Webster also was found “hoofing it.” 
Ben Franklin, too, was a portly looking, pedestrian and printer—afoot, no doubt because of the activities of the illustrious horsethieves among our sanctimonious ancestors. 
Being St. Patrick’s day, I ankled over to the statue of John Barry of Wexford, Ire. . . he too was on foot it having been thought unnessesary to have him standing on a quarterdeck (of cards) even.. 
Here was old Doc. Hahnemann (in five poses) Founder of the Homoeopathic School of collecting fees — he has three names, (space forbids the printing of them) sufficient to say, “Die Milde Macht ist Gross in Omnibus Caritas.” Prescriptions Carefully Confounded. Just as if it made any difference whether one puts little or much sugar in hi? coffee, once two or absent mindedly (a normal state) twice two heaping spoonfulls; with or with out. . . nature takes its course towards remedying accumulated ills whether prescriptions are carelessly muddled or no. 
Monument after monument tends to prove that the trend is towards death. . . and Washington right now with its statues resembles a struggling graveyard unable to complete its mission of perpetuating the fast failing memory of our lustreous dead. 
Even George Rothwell Brown, the live paragrapher of the Wash. Post, in Postscripts, jumps in to his pants wrong end to, and opines that “if Molly Pitcher had been a suffragist instead of a soldier (soldieress) she’d have had a statue in the Capital long ago, instead of a second-hand grave at West Point.” 
George. George! What ails thee? Can thee not see that just now the beloved people ain’t got money enough to start statuefying the women? Throw your eye over to the incompleted and deserted Washington Memorial . . just as soon as we get work, “the people will finish that job.” Money’s tight, even in the Jewish precinct, 7th St.— is it N. E., N. W. or W.? 
I had no compass. 
Yes we have statues and will have more of them—that is what the people want, and the will of the people is supreme in this and every world. . . And, I am sure, the people will not rest until they have me, poor me, life-like sitting on a boxcar, perched on one wheel on that vacant pedestal in Capital park. 
Where the Sifo-Kid, Father Knicker-bocker or whoever he is (on top the Dome) could gaze down at a working man, gone but not forgotten. — T-bone Slim