Few have ever been vilified or abused as Johnson was abused in our state that year; his red car might have been a chariot of flame driven by an anarchist, from the way some of the people talked. Strange, inexplicable hatred in humanity for those who love it most! Tom Johnson campaigned that year on a platform which demanded a two-cent-a-mile railway fare and the taxation of railroad property at something like its value, or at least, he said the railroads should pay in taxes as much, relatively, as a man paid on his home; the poor man was paying on more than a sixty per cent. valuation while the railways were valued at eighteen or twenty per cent. This was dangerous, even revolutionary doctrine, of course, and Johnson was a single-taxer, supposed in Ohio to be a method of taxation whereby everybody would be relieved of taxation except the farmers who were to be taxed according to the superficial area of their farms. And of course Johnson was defeated, and yet within two years the legislature enacted the first of these proposals into law with but one dissenting vote. Thus heresy becomes orthodoxy. The proposal for taxation reform still waits, and will wait, I fancy, for years, since it is so fundamental, and mankind never attacks fundamental problems until it has exhausted all the superficial ones. And yet, while many other changes he contended for in his day have been made, while many of his heresies have become orthodoxies, the fear of him possessed the rural mind in the legislature until his death, and almost any measure could be defeated by merely uttering the formula “Tom Johnson.” XXX One remembers one’s friends in various attitudes, and I see Tom Johnson now standing on the platform in the old tent, under the flaring lights, with the eager crowd before him--there were never such intelligent audiences to speak to as those in Cleveland, unless it were those in Toledo--and he was at his best when the crowd was heckling him. He was like Severus Cassius, who, as Montaigne says, “spoke best extempore, and stood more obliged to fortune than his own diligence; it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking, and his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger redouble his eloquence.” He voluntarily introduced the custom of heckling so prevalent in England and Scotland, because at first he was not a proficient speaker; he was so simple, so direct, so positive, that he could state his position in a very few words. Thus, as he told me once, his speeches were too short for the customary political meeting in a state where political oratory flowed on and on indefinitely, and he asked the crowd to put questions to him. This stirred him up, put him on his mettle, stimulated his thought, and he was best at this short range. And no one ever got the better of him. Once an opponent triumphantly demanded, in a campaign in which Johnson’s administration was charged with extravagance: