“Mr. Johnson, is it not a fact that under your administration the Cleveland workhouse has lost money?” “Yes, sir,” the Mayor replied promptly. “How do you explain that?” “We are not trying to make money in the Cleveland workhouse,” the Mayor replied instantly, “we are trying to make MEN!” Or again I see him, superintending the tearing up of street railway tracks, on streets where the franchises of the private company had expired, to make room for the rails of the city company, calmly smoking a cigar, and with a gesture of his expressive delicate white hand waving aside the latest of the many injunctions that were sued out against him. The battle was never lost to him, though his followers were often discouraged. He might have said of court injunctions as Napoleon said of bullets at the battle of Krasnoi: “Bah! They have been whistling about our legs these forty years!” But I see him best I think in the great hall of his home in Euclid Avenue, one short, fat leg tucked comfortably under him, his cigar in his aristocratic hand, his friends and admirers about him. It was a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men. One of them had been originally an opponent, one of those who heckled him in the tent, a fiery young radical not long since a blacklisted mechanic who had gone hungry when on strike, Peter Witt, one of the most picturesque personalities in Ohio politics; he became one of Johnson’s intimate friends and strongest supporters, and a splendid speaker on the stump. He was city clerk of Cleveland under all the Johnson administrations and is now the street railway commissioner of that city under Mayor Newton D. Baker, who, as city solicitor, was another of the group of those happy days. Mr. Baker was like a boy in appearance, with his sensitive face and the ideals of a poet, and a brilliant lawyer. He carried all the legal burden of the long street railway controversy in Cleveland,--it was almost a civil war--and did it all with such skill and ability, and withal with such grace and courtesy and good nature that he never offended his opponents, who were the leading corporation lawyers of the city. Frederic C. Howe had been elected to the council in Cleveland as a Republican from one of the most aristocratic wards, but he was won over by Johnson’s personality, was renominated by Johnson on the Democratic ticket, afterwards sent to the state senate and became one of the foremost men in the liberal movement in America; his books on municipal government are authorities. And Dr. Cooley; he was a Disciple preacher, and Johnson placed him at the head of the department of charities and corrections, so that, as Johnson used to say, instead of a preacher Dr. Cooley became a minister. It was delightful to be with them in those gatherings. The genuine reform of conditions in that city possessed them all like a passion; they were stimulated by a common ambition, which was, as Johnson used to say,