Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

But the sun came out again as we climbed the hills that overlook Mansfield, to command a lovely scene, broad fertile valleys all renewed by the rain and flooded with sunshine, and I remembered that Altgeld had once lived there, and beheld this same landscape, that he had taught school in that town and from there had gone away with a regiment to fight in the Civil War. The chauffeur got out and took the chains off the tires, while we sat silent under the influences of the beauty of those little Ohio hills. And then, as we started on, the clouds returned, the scene darkened, and it began to rain again, and, before we knew, the car skidded and we were in the ditch. The wife of the farmer whose garden fence we had broken in our accident revealed all the old rural dislike of the urbanite; she said she was glad of our fate, since motorists were forever racing by and killing her chickens, and with this difficulty I left Ashley to deal, since he had been president of a railroad and was experienced in adjusting claims, and, after he had parleyed a while, I saw him take out his pocketbook, and then the chauffeur got the car out of the ditch and we were on our way again.

The scenes and the experiences of that journey remain with me in a distinctness that is keen in my senses still; because I suppose I felt that in the race with time we were then engaged upon, if we were to reach Columbus that evening for the meeting which was to close the campaign, I was in a symbolic manner racing with my own fate; that campaign a success and I should be free. I should have liked to linger a while in Delaware, where I had spent a portion of my boyhood when my father was a pastor there, and where in the University my uncle William F. Whitlock had been a professor of Latin and literature for half a century, dean of the faculty, and, for a while, president. As we passed by the chapel in the shade of the old elms on the campus I felt that I could still hear the solemn strains of the noble hymn they sang at his funeral, the lusty young voices of a thousand students, united with the quivering trebles of some old clergymen, in “Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still.”

My eyes could pierce the walls of the chapel, closed and silent that afternoon for the autumn term had not opened, and I could see myself sitting there in the pew with our family, and looking at the portrait in oil of my uncle on the wall, among the portraits of the other presidents of the University, faintly adumbrating on his great smoothly shaven face the smile of quizzical humor which he wears in my memory. I sat there,

by these tears a little boy again,

and thought of those days so long before when at evening he would come to our house and stand spreading his hands before the fire for a while; he generally brought under his arm a book for my father to read. I remembered that he used to carry papers in his high hat, and that his coat stood away from his neck, round which he wore a low standing collar, with a black cravat. He seemed to carry in the pocket of his waistcoat an endless succession of eyeglasses; he would use a pair, take them down from his high nose, lay them on the table, forget them, and, when he wished to read again, draw another pair from his waistcoat pocket. And I went on thinking of him as he looked over his glasses on that evening when I had gone late into his study and found him bent over his desk with the “Satires” of Juvenal before him, studying his lesson for the morrow, he said. I thought he knew all the Latin there was left in this world, but, “Oh, no,” he said, and added: “If you would sometimes study at this hour of the night perhaps——” He did not finish his sentence, since it finished itself.... “I don’t exactly know how to render that passage, Professor,” a student, blundering through an unmastered lesson, said in conciliatory accents one morning. “Ah, that has been evident for some time,” my uncle replied.... And now there he lay in his coffin, on the spot in that dim chapel where he had so often stood up to address the students; he was gone with all those others whose portraits hung on the wall, men who had stood to me in my boyhood as the great figures of the world. I should see him walking under those trees no more, his tall form stooped in habitual meditation.... They were all big, those Whitlock forbears of mine, six feet tall every one of them, grim Puritans, I think, when they first came to this country three centuries ago.... And I had a vision of my uncle as walking that afternoon in other groves with all these dark ministerial figures that towered over my boyhood. They were all Puritans, too, strong and rugged men, inflexible, obdurate, much enduring, stern pioneers whose like is known no more. And I, who could join in the lofty strains of that old hymn, as a memorial to my uncle, could find unavailing regret in my reverence.... But all changes, and it was a time of change, one of those periods which make up the whelming tragedy of this life. And, as they had gone, so all the old combinations had disappeared with them, resolved into the elements that make up that shadowy vale we call the past.... But we were driving on, racing away from that past as fast as we could go, on by the cemetery where my uncle lies in his grave, on by the rocky ledges of the Olentangy, the little stream where we boys used to swim, and, just as darkness was falling, besmattered with mud, we drove into Columbus, and along High Street, hideous in the crazy decorations that were hung out in honor of the State Fair, and up to the Neil House—and across the street on the steps of the old state house four or five thousand people already gathered for the meeting at which I was to be the only speaker. A bath and a bite of supper, and then across the street to the meeting, and I was standing there before that vast crowd, and over us the shadowy mass of the old capitol, in which my grandfather had made the first motion that was ever put in it as a member of the senate half a century before; he told me that his two sons danced all night at the ball with which its opening was celebrated....

And so, on that brilliant Sunday morning in September, as we entered the motor car in Columbus, with the impressions of the great meeting of that Saturday night still fresh and vivid in the mind, I could settle myself for the long drive back to Toledo over the white pikes that wound northward between the fair fields of our beautiful Ohio, and say to myself, over and over, with the delicious sensations of a secret, that the relief had almost come at last, and that now I could do the thing I loved to do—if only the people would approve the constitutional amendments at the election on Tuesday. There were the happiest of auguries in the sky; it was without a cloud to fleck its blue expanse, and the sun blazed and its light sparkled in the fresh air, and as we rode the fields swept by, the pastures still green, the ripening corn tall in maturity, nodding its heavy tassels and waving its broad leaves of dark green, the mown fields yellow with their stubble, and the wide land, somnolent and heavy with fecundity, already rich with the gold of autumn.

And the people did approve, with vast majorities, and among all the principles of democracy they wrote in their fundamental law that day was that of municipal home rule, so that all those cities, undreamed of when the old constitution had been written, and all those little towns, silent and sleepy in the drowse of that Sunday afternoon, might own and operate their public utilities, might draft their own charters, have what form of government they pleased, in short, become free. And so the great dream of Johnson and of Jones came true at last.

LXIII

It was of the Free City they had dreamed and that they had not lived to behold the fulfillment of their dream was, in its way, the final certification of the validity of their services as pioneers. It is an old rule of life, or an old trick of the fates that seem so casually to govern life, that the dreams of mortals are seldom destined to come true, though mortals sometimes thwart the fates by finding their dreams in themselves sufficient. In this sense Jones and Johnson had already been rewarded. It had been a dream of wonder and of beauty, the vision of a city stately with towers, above which there hung the glow which poor Jude used to see at evening when he climbed to the roof of the Brown House on the ridgeway near Marygreen. It was a city in which there were the living conceptions of justice, pity, mercy, consideration, toleration, beauty, art, all those graces which mankind so long has held noblest and most dear. It was a city wherein human life was precious, and therefore gracious, a city which the citizen loved as a graduate loves his alma mater, a city with a communal spirit. There the old ideas of privilege had given way to the ideals of service, public property was held as sacred as private property, power was lightly wielded, the people’s voice was intelligent and omnipotent, for they had learned the wisdom that confuses demagogues, and amid the interplay of myriad forces, the democratic spirit was ever at work, performing its noble functions. You might have said that the people were inspired, since they united so readily in great constructive work, reducing to order and scientific arrangement all the manifold needs and expressions of the daily life, conquering in the old struggle against nature, providing against all that casualty and accident which make life to-day such a snarl of squalid tragedies and ridiculous comedies that it well may seem to be ruled by none other than the most whimsical and spiteful of irresponsible spirits. It was more than a city indeed, it was a realm of reason, wherein the people at last in good will were living a social life. The eternal negative, the everlasting no, had given way to a new affirmation; each morning should ordain new emancipations, and each evening behold new reconciliations among men. It was a city wherein the people were achieving more and more of leisure, that life in all her splendor and her beauty and her glory might not pass by unhailed, unrecognized even, by so many toiling thousands. It was the vision of a city set upon a hill, with happy people singing in the streets.

These words I know but vaguely express the vision that had come to those two men with the unpoetic names of Johnson and Jones. When I speak of a city where people sing in the streets I am perfectly well aware of the smile that touches the lips of sophistication, though the smile would have been none the less cynical had I mentioned merely a city in which there were happy people at all. I am perfectly well aware that such a thing in all literalness is perhaps impossible to the weary, preoccupied crowds in the streets of any of our cities; it would be too absurd, too ridiculous, and probably against the law, if not indeed quite wicked. In Mr. Housman’s somber lines: