But Steffens did not write us up, as the reporters phrase it. I think Jones perplexed him in those first days, though he knows now that Jones was wholly and I had almost said solely right. Jones indeed perplexed most of us. A man with a program of a thousand years could not be expected to interest so vitally our impatient democracy, as would one with a program so speedy and simple that it involved nothing more complex than putting all the bad people in jail; and there was always someone ready to point out the bad people, so that it seemed simple, as well it might to those who had forgotten that even that program is six thousand years old, at least, according to Archbishop Ussher’s chronology. Steffens, however, was seeking types and in the two leading cities of Ohio he found them so perfect that he need never have gone further--had it not been for people like that fellow citizen of ours who filled Steffens with such despair. But while he was gathering his data on Cincinnati and on Cleveland he came to see us often, to our delight, and continued to come, so that he knew our city and our politics almost better than we knew them ourselves. He went to Cleveland, I remember, with some distinct prejudice against Tom Johnson; the prejudice so easily imbibed in gentlemen’s clubs. But I was delighted when, after his investigation, he wrote that story in _McClure’s_ which characterized Tom Johnson as the best mayor of the best governed city in the United States. I was delighted because I was flattered in my own opinion, because I was fond of Tom Johnson, and because it appeared just in the nick of time to turn the tide in Johnson’s third campaign. Jones was delighted, too; he had said almost immediately after Johnson became mayor of Cleveland that he “loved him” because, in appointing the Reverend Harris R. Cooley as Director of Charities and Corrections, Johnson selected a man who began at once to parole prisoners from the workhouse, and Jones and Johnson became friends as Johnson and Pingree had been friends. It was a peculiar instance of the whimsical and profligate generosity of the fates that the three cities grouped at the western end of Lake Erie like those cities Walt Whitman saw, or thought he saw, “as sisters with their arms around each others’ necks” should have had about the same time three such mayors as Pingree in Detroit, Johnson in Cleveland and Jones in Toledo, though the three men were different in everything except their democracy.