The predilection of the Ohio man for politics, I believe, is well known in this land, where it is generally identified with a love for office. There is a reproach implied in the reputation which we perhaps deserve. An Ohio man goes into politics as naturally as a Nova Scotian goes to sea, and yet not all Nova Scotians go to sea. They all love the sea perhaps, but they do not all care to become sailors. And so with us Ohioans. We all love politics, though fortunately we do not all care to hold office, even if most people do smile indulgently when the modest disinclination is expressed. Perhaps such scepticism is quite natural in a land so saturated in privilege that even office holding is regarded in that light--or was until recently, for now a new conception is expanding in the public consciousness and there is hope that ere long public office will be regarded as a responsibility. I was quite sure that I did not care to be a councilman--that weekly wrangle, by night, in a room choking with the fumes of cheap tobacco, known as the session of the common council, was far from my tastes. And when the mayoralty was suggested to me I was quite as certain that I did not wish that. For it was not long after the death of Jones that it was suggested; by Tom Johnson for one, who, in his blunt way, told me that I should run for the place; and by Steffens, who, just then in Cleveland, was writing the article in which Tom Johnson was celebrated as “the best mayor of the best governed city in America,” and Steffens found time now and then to come over to Toledo to see us. “And another thing,” he wrote to me after one of these visits, “you’ll have to run for mayor.” He reached this conclusion, I believe, by a process of inversion. He had been talking with some of the machine politicians, and it was their objection to me as a candidate that caused him to see my duty in that light. I was at one with them on that point, at any rate; they could have been no more reluctant to have me run than I myself was. Tom Johnson, when the Democrats met in their state convention at Columbus that year, might propose me for governor, and the delegation of his county, Cuyahoga, and the delegation from my own county of Lucas vote for my nomination, but that stroke of political lightning was easily arrested by rods that had been more accurately and carefully adjusted, so that I could take the manuscript of “The Turn of the Balance” and go to Wequetonsing on the shores of Little Traverse Bay, where the days are blue and gold, and there is sparkling sunshine, and a golf links where one may find happiness, if he is on his game, or if he is not, consolation in that noble view from the hill--the tee at the old fourth and the new twelfth hole--when he may, if he wish, imagine himself in Italy overlooking the Bay of Naples--which is no more beautiful. Meredith Nicholson, a hale old Hoosier friend, as James Whitcomb Riley used to phrase it, was there, too, near the spot where