It had been, of course, a direct offense to Jones, and it was intended to take from him the last of his powers. He had been greatly roused by it; the morning after the law had been enacted he had appeared at my house before breakfast to discuss this latest assault upon liberty. The law was an exact replica of a law that had been passed for Cincinnati many years before, and that law had been sustained by the Supreme Court in a decision which had made it the leading case on that subject of constitutional law for a whole generation. Time and again it had been attacked and always it had been sustained; to contest the constitutionality of this new act seemed the veriest folly. But Jones was determined to resist; like some stout burgomaster of an old free city of Germany he determined to stand out against the city’s overlords from the rural districts, and he insisted on my representing him in the litigation which his resistance would certainly provoke. I had no hope of winning, and told him so; I explained the precedent in the Cincinnati case, and that only made him more determined; if there was one thing more than another for which he had a supreme and sovereign contempt it was a legal precedent. My brethren at the bar all laughed at me, as I knew they would; but I went to work, and after a few days’ investigation became convinced that the doctrine laid down in that leading case was not at all sound. When I came to this conviction, I induced Jones to retain additional counsel, one of the most brilliant lawyers at our bar, Mr. Clarence Brown, a man who, in addition to his knowledge of the law, could bring to the forum a charming personality, a wit and an eloquence that were irresistible. He, too, set to work, and in a few days he was convinced, as I, that the precedent should be overthrown. Jones refused to turn over the command of the police to the new commissioners whom the governor appointed; they applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, we tried the case, and we won, overthrowing not only the doctrine at the Cincinnati case, but the whole fabric of municipal legislation in the state, so that a special session of the legislature was necessary to enact new codes for the government of the cities. Our satisfaction and our pride in our legal achievement was somewhat modified by the fact that the application of the same rule to conditions in our sister city of Cleveland had the effect, in certain cases then pending, of pulling down the work which another great mayor, Tom L. Johnson, was then doing in that city. It was even said that the Supreme Court had been influenced by the desire of Mark Hanna, Tom Johnson’s ancient enemy in Cleveland, to see his old rival defeated. Some were unkind enough to say that Mark Hanna’s influence was more powerful with the court, as at that time constituted, than was the logic of the attorneys who were representing Golden Rule Jones.