His struggle for three-cent railway fares in Cleveland, which was but a roundabout method of securing municipal ownership in a state where the legislature in those days would not permit cities to own their public utilities was his great work. He lived to see that successful in a way, though not exactly in the way he had expected; that is another irony which the fates visit on the head of ambitious men.
And yet that irony of the fates is not always, after all, unkind. Somehow, after a while, in the lengthened perspective, the broadened vision that reveals a larger segment of the arc, the event is seen in better proportion. It requires faith in one’s cause to see this always, and Johnson always had that faith. I shall not forget how when the people at last voted against him, he still could smile, and say to me: “The people are probably right.” It was the last time I saw him. He was sick then, and dying, and sadly changed; the hair that had been so black and curly that summer morning long before, had grown thin and white; the face, sadly lined with weariness, was sublimated by a new expression. There was the same courage in the classic profile, and the old smile was there. He was writing his memoirs with a courage as grim as that of General Grant—and he had the equanimity of Antoninus Pius. And on his countenance there was the expression of a purified ideal. So he had won; his was the victory after all.
XXXI
The best of life, no doubt, is made up of memories, as M. George Cain says, and perhaps that is why I have lingered so long over these little incidents of Sam Jones and Tom Johnson. I have told them in no sort of related order; Jones died years before Johnson; but somehow they seem to me to have appeared simultaneously, like twin stars in our northern sky, to have blazed a while and then gone out together. Different as their personalities were, different as two such great originals must have been, they were one in ideal, and even in their last words they expressed the vast toil and strain of the efforts they put forth to attain it.
“Was it worth while?” asked Tom Johnson of his friend Newton Baker, a day or two before he died. And Sam Jones on that last day turned to his sister Nell, the noble spirit who had conducted the settlement work at Golden Rule House, and said:
“‘He that endureth to the end——’ What does it say?”
She repeated the Scripture to him.
“Say it in Welsh,” he said, his thought returning in those ultimate moments to the speech they had used as children. But before she could direct her mind into the old sequences, the end had come.
At least, there were those in town who thought it was the end. The stock of the street railway company went up twenty-four points the next morning, and some brokers issued a letter saying now that Jones had died the securities of that enterprise offered a golden investment—about the most authentic extant illustration, I suppose, of the utter contemptibility of privilege in these states. The politicians often had been heard to say that when Jones retired the non-partizan movement in Toledo would come to an end; in their professional analyses they had pronounced it a personal following not governed by principle, and that with the passing of the leader it would disappear and the voters become tractable and docile partizan automata again. And now that Jones was dead and one of their organization, the president of the council, was to succeed to the mayor’s office, the hopes they had so long entertained seemed at last on the point of realisation. Within a few weeks, therefore, an ordinance granting the street railway company a renewal of its rights was passed by the council.
Then, instantly, the old spirit flamed anew; there were editorials, mass meetings, and all sorts of protest against the action, and in response to this indignant public feeling, the acting mayor, Mr. Robert H. Finch, very courageously vetoed the ordinance. But the machine “had the votes,” and on the following Monday night the council met to pass the ordinance over the veto. The members of the Republican organization were there, favored with seats in the office of the city clerk; lobbyists and the legal representatives of the street railway company were there. The chamber was crowded; the hot air of the small, low-ceiled room was charged with a nervous tension; there was in it an eager expectant quality, not unmixed with dread and fear and guilt. The atmosphere was offensive to the moral sense—a condition remarked in other halls in this land when councils and legislatures have been about to take action that was inimical to the public good.