“Did you take out what you wanted?” asked the Mayor. “No, suh, I didn’t take any.” “Here, then,” said Jones, and he gave the man a half-dollar and went on. There was no possible ostentation in this; it was perfectly natural; he was doing such things every hour of the day. He had no need to stop there, in the dark, to impress me, his friend and intimate. I do him wrong even to stoop to explain so much. But I wonder how much good his confidence did that wandering outcast? How much good did it do to me? By the operation of the same law which brought that vagrant back to Jones’s side with all the money, I with my distrust, might have been treated far differently. Or so, at least, it seems to me, and I tell this incident as one which proves the reverence Jones had for the great natural law of love. For the chief count in the indictment respectability brought against him was that he had no reverence for law. To see and hear them when they said this, one would have supposed that a council or legislature had never been corrupted in the land. It used to amuse Jones to reflect that his literal acceptance of the fundamental principle of Christianity should have been such a novel and unprecedented thing that it instantly marked him out from all the other Christians and made him famous in Christendom. XXVI I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done. Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presented the unique spectacle of a modern city in which this principle was discussed as though it were something newly discovered. Some seemed to think that Jones had invented it; they said it was absurd, that it really would not work. Of course most regarded it, as most now regard the Golden Rule, as a pretty sentiment merely, something for the children in Sunday-school. It is considered, of course, as any sophisticated person knows, as altogether impractical, and even silly and absurd.