XXIII
There was something pathetic in that last campaign, the pathos, perhaps, of the last phase. The long years of opposition had begun to tell: there was a strong determination to defeat him. He had not wished to stand again for the office, but, after the Toledo custom, there had been presented to him an informal petition, signed by several thousand citizens, asking him to do so, and he had consented. But when he wrote a statement setting forth his position—it was a document with the strong flavor of his personality in it—the newspapers refused to publish it; some of them would not publish it even as advertising, and he opened his campaign on the post-office corner, standing bare-headed in the March wind, his son Paul blowing a saxophone to attract a crowd. Many of his old supporters were falling away; it seemed for a time that he alone would have to make the campaign without any to speak for him on the stump; far otherwise than in that second campaign, when, after having been counted out in the Republican convention, he had run for the first time independently, a “Man Without a Party,” as he called himself; and thousands, themselves outraged by the treatment his own party had accorded him, in the spirit of fair play had rallied to his standard.
But now things had changed, and an incident which occurred at the beginning of this campaign was significant of the feeling toward him, though in all kindness it most not be told in detail. There was a prominent man in town who had publicly reviled him and criticized him and persecuted him, who had done that which cut him more deeply than all else, that is, he had impugned his motives and questioned his sincerity. In some human hunger for understanding, I suppose, Jones went to this man with his written statement of his position and asked him to read it, merely to read it. The fellow’s answer was to snatch the paper from Jones’s hand and tear it up in his face. It is easy to imagine what a man ordinarily would do in the face of such an amazing insult; surely, if ever, the time had come for the “shotgun and the club.” Mayor Jones was large and powerful, he had been reared in the oil fields, where blows are quick as tempers; he was athletic, always in training, for he took constant physical exercise (one of the counts against him, indeed, was that he slept out of doors on the roof of his back porch, a bit of radicalism in those days, grown perfectly orthodox in these progressive times), and he was a Celt, naturally quick to resent insult, of a temperament prompt to take fire. But he turned away from the fellow, without a word.
He came to my office immediately afterward, and I saw that he was trying hard to master some unusual emotion. I shall never forget him as he sat there, telling me of his experience. After a little while his face broke into that beautiful smile of his, more beautiful than I had ever seen it, and he said:
“Well, I’ve won the greatest victory of my life; I have won at last a victory over myself, over my own nature. I have done what it has always been hardest for me to do.”
“What?” I asked.
He sat in silence for a moment, and then he said:
“You know, it has always seemed to me that the most remarkable thing that was ever said of Jesus was that when he was reviled, he reviled not again. It is the hardest thing in the world to do.”
The struggle over the renewal of the franchise grants to the street railway company had already begun, and the council had attempted to grant it the franchise it wished, renewing its privileges for another twenty-five years. When Mayor Jones vetoed the bill, the council prepared to pass it over his veto, and would have done so that Monday night had it not been for two men—Mayor Jones and Mr. Negley D. Cochran, the editor of the News-Bee, a newspaper which has always taken the democratic viewpoint of public questions. Mr. Cochran, with his brilliant gift in the writing of editorials, had called out the whole populace, almost, to attend the meeting of the council and to protest. The demonstration was so far effective that the council was too frightened to pass the street railway ordinance. The attorney for the street railway company was there, and when there was a lull in the noise, he sneered:
“I suppose, Mr. Mayor, that this is an example of government under the Golden Rule.”