to make Cleveland a city set on a hill, and though he was not a poet nor a maker of phrases everyone instinctively knew what he meant when he spoke of his city set on a hill. I do not know how much of history he had read, but he knew intuitively that the city in all ages has been the outpost of civilization, and that if the problem of democracy is to be solved at all it is to be solved first in the city. That was why he struggled for the free city, struggled to make the city democratic; he knew that the cure for the ills of democracy is not less democracy, as so many were always preaching, but more democracy. And how delighted he was when Fred Howe brought out his book “The City the Hope of Democracy.” He had the joy of seeing marshaled there in the thesis of a scholar all the arguments he had apprehended but had never reduced to terms; there they were, all in their logical order--and Johnson straightway sent a copy of the book to every member of the Ohio legislature, to their amazement no doubt, if not to their amusement. I used to like to go over to Cleveland and meet that charming group Johnson had gathered about him. There was in them a spirit I never saw in such fullness elsewhere; they were all working for the city, they thought only of the success of the whole. They had the city sense, a love of their town like that love which undergraduates have for their university, the _esprit de corps_ of the crack regiment. But Johnson used to set me to work with the rest of them. I went over there once to spend the week’s end, for rest and relaxation, and he had me working far into three nights on amendments to the municipal code. He had terrible energy, but it was a joy to work with him. I wish I had gone oftener. I have said enough I hope to make it clear that Tom Johnson was one of those mortals who have somehow been lifted above their fellows far enough to catch a vision of the social order which people generally as yet do not see. It was inevitable, of course, that such a man, especially since he was a rich man, should have his motives impugned, and I recall now with what a confidential chuckle he said to me one time when he had been accused of I know not what vaulting and wicked ambition: “I am politically ambitious; I have just one ambition; I want to be the mayor of a free city, and if I were, the very first thing I should do would be to appoint a corps of assessors who couldn’t see a building, or an improvement; they would assess for taxation nothing but the value of the land, and we would try out the single tax.” He did not realize that ambition of course; no one ever realizes his ambition. But he did perhaps more than any other man in America to make possible the coming of the free city in this land.