These words I know but vaguely express the vision that had come to those two men with the unpoetic names of Johnson and Jones. When I speak of a city where people sing in the streets I am perfectly well aware of the smile that touches the lips of sophistication, though the smile would have been none the less cynical had I mentioned merely a city in which there were happy people at all. I am perfectly well aware that such a thing in all literalness is perhaps impossible to the weary, preoccupied crowds in the streets of any of our cities; it would be too absurd, too ridiculous, and probably against the law, if not indeed quite wicked. In Mr. Housman’s somber lines: These are not in plight to bear, If they would, another’s care. They have enough as ’tis: I see In many an eye that measures me The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind. Undone with misery, all they can Is to hate their fellow man; And till they drop they needs must still Look at you and wish you ill. And yet, it is not wholly impossible after all. One evening in Brussels, hearing the strains of a band I looked out of my hotel window, and saw a throng of youth and maidens dancing in a mist of rain down an asphalt pavement that glistened under the electric lights. It was a sight of such innocence, of such simple joy and gayety as one could never behold in our cities, and it occasioned no more remark, was considered no more out of place or unbecoming than it would be for a man to sprawl on one of our sidewalks and look for a dime he had dropped. But I happened to use that phrase about singing in the streets simply because it was one Jones used to employ, just as Johnson used forever to be talking about his city set on a hill. If Johnson’s phrase was in an old poetic strain Jones meant literally what he said. He used to talk of the crowds he had seen along the boulevards of Paris, and the gayety, impossible to us, in which they had celebrated the 14th of July, and he talked of all this to such purpose that Toledo became the first city in America to have a “sane” Fourth of July. Jones and Johnson, because they had vision, were thinking in sequences far beyond the material conceptions of the communities about them, and utterly impossible to skulking city politicians, with their miserable little treacheries and contemptible and selfish ambitions. They were imagining a spirit which might and perhaps some day will possess a whole people. And when I intimated the pity it was that they had not lived to see that silvery September day when the people of Ohio voted for municipal autonomy, I did not mean in the least to aver that their dream had been realized for us, simply because we had secured an amendment to our fundamental law. Memoranda to this effect had been noted on the roll of the constitution, but these after all were but the cold, formal and unlovely terms that expressed concepts which had been evolving slowly in the public consciousness.