“Say it again—once more!” he demanded. And again they shouted it in a splendid chorus. And then——
“Well,” said Golden Rule Jones, “I can’t pronounce it, but it sounds good, and that is what we are after in this campaign.”
Now that I have written it down, I have a feeling that I have utterly failed to give an adequate sense of the entire spontaneity and simplicity with which this was done. It was, of course, tremendously effective as a bit of campaigning, but only because it was so wholly sincere. Five minutes later he was hotly debating with a working man who had interrupted him to accuse him of being unfair to union labor in his shops, and there was no coddling, no truckling, no effort to win or to please on his part, though he would take boundlessly patient pains to explain to anyone who really wanted to know anything about him or his official acts.
He was natural, simple and unspoiled, as naïve as a child, and “except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” He fully realized that the kingdom of heaven is within one’s self; he was not looking for it, or expecting it anywhere outside of himself, certainly he was not expecting it in a political campaign, or in the mere process of being elected to an office. He regarded his office, indeed, only as an opportunity to serve, and he had been in that office long enough to have lost any illusions he may ever have had concerning it; one term will suffice to teach a man that lesson, even though he seek the office again.
He was like an evangelist, in a way, and his meetings were in the broad sense religious, though he had long since left his church, not because its ministers were always condemning him, but for the same reasons that Tolstoy left his church. His evangel was that of liberty. He had written a number of little songs. One of them, set to the tune of an old hymn he had heard in Wales as a boy, had a noble effect when the crowd sang it. It was the Gad im Deimle. His wife, who is an accomplished musician, had transposed its minors into majors, and in its strains, as they were sung by the men in his shops,—and there was singing for you!—or by the people in his political meetings, there was all the Welsh love of music, all the Welsh love of liberty, and a high and pure emotion in the chorus:
Ever growing, swiftly flowing,
Like a mighty river
Sweeping on from shore to shore,
Love will rule this wide world o’er.
It was his Welsh blood, this Celtic strain in him, that accounted for much that was in his temperament, his wit, his humor, his instinctive appreciation of art, his contempt for artificial distinctions, his love of liberty, his passionate democracy. Sitting one evening not long ago in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons I saw the great Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, saw him enter and take his seat on the government bench. And as I looked at him I was impressed by his resemblance to someone I had known; there was a strange, haunting likeness, not in any physical characteristic, though there was the same Welsh ruddiness, and the hair was something like—but when Mr. Lloyd George turned and whispered to the prime minister and smiled I started, and said to myself: “It is Jones!”