The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;
The love is to the lover and comes back most to him;
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail.
XXVII
I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the Chicago Herald, and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state, many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning—I think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton county delegation had been shooting at one another in Banks Street in an effort to settle certain of those differences in the science of statecraft which then were apt, as they are now, to trouble the counsels of the Cincinnati politicians—I was walking along Superior Street when I heard a band playing the sweet and somehow pathetic strains of “Home Again, Home Again.” There were other bands playing that morning, but the prevailing tune was “The Campbells are Coming”; for we might as well have been Scotchmen at the siege of Lucknow in Ohio during those years that James E. Campbell was Governor of our state. We grew to love the tune and we grew to love him, he was so brilliant and human and affable; but he could not pose very well in a frock coat, and after he had been renominated at that very convention, McKinley defeated him for governor.
But as I was saying, it was not “The Campbells are Coming” which the band was playing that morning, but “Home Again,” and along the wide street, with an intimate sense of proprietorship that excluded strangers from this particular demonstration, people were saying:
“It’s Tom Johnson, home from Europe!”
It was his own employees who had gone forth to meet him, the men who worked for him in the street railway system he owned in Cleveland in those days, and I thought it rather a pretty compliment that a man’s employees should like him so well that they would turn out to welcome him with a band when he came home from his holiday abroad. I could understand their feeling when an hour later I saw Tom Johnson in the Hollenden Hotel, the center of a group of political friends; he seemed as glad as any of them to be back among so many Democrats. He still had his youth, and there was in his manner a peculiar, subtle charm, a gift with which the gods are rather stingy among the sons of men. I can see him now, his curly hair moist with the heat of the summer day, his profile, clear enough for a Greek coin, and the smile that never failed him, or failed a situation, to the end. He was, I think, in Congress in those days of which I am writing, or if he was not, he went to Congress soon after from one of the Cleveland districts. And while he was there he wrote a remarkable letter in response to a communication he had received from some girls who worked in a cloak factory in Cleveland, asking him to vote against the Wilson tariff bill when it was amended by adding a specific duty to the ad valorem duty on women’s cloaks. The girls, of course, poor things, had not written the communication; it was written by the editor of a protectionist newspaper in Cleveland, and the response which Johnson sent was one of the simplest and clearest expositions of the evils of protection I ever read. I had read it when it was published, and had been delighted, but it was not for a dozen years that I was able to tell Johnson of my delight, and then one day as he and Dr. Frederic C. Howe and I were at luncheon I spoke of the letter. He laughed.
“It was a great letter, wasn’t it?” he said.