It may be that in this view of life some dangerous apothegms are involved; as we grow older we grow conservative, and conservatism is a kind of cynicism, a kind of fear, the trembling distrust of age. But I know that in the life concept to which Jones came in his study of this principle, every act of his life, no matter how trifling and insignificant it may have seemed, suddenly took on a vast and vital significance; so that the hasty glance, the unkind word, the very spirit in which a thing is said or done, were seen to have an effect which may reach farther than the imagination can go, an effect not only on one’s own life and character, but on the lives and characters of all those about him. He was always human; I say that to prevent any impression that he was solemn or priggish; he deliberately took up smoking, for instance, toward the end of his days, because, he said with a chuckle, one must have some vices. And sometimes when the Golden Rule seemed not to “work,” he would truly say it was only because he didn’t know how to work it. And he used to quote Walt Whitman: The song is to the singer and comes back most to him; * * * * * The love is to the lover and comes back most to him; The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail. XXVII I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the Chicago _Herald_, and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state, many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning--I think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton county delegation had been shooting at one another in Banks Street in an effort to settle certain of those differences in the science of statecraft which then were apt, as they are now, to trouble the counsels of the Cincinnati politicians--I was walking along Superior Street when I heard a band playing the sweet and somehow pathetic strains of “Home Again, Home Again.” There were other bands playing that morning, but the prevailing tune was “The Campbells are Coming”; for we might as well have been Scotchmen at the siege of Lucknow in Ohio during those years that James E. Campbell was Governor of our state. We grew to love the tune and we grew to love him, he was so brilliant and human and affable; but he could not pose very well in a frock coat, and after he had been renominated at that very convention, McKinley defeated him for governor. But as I was saying, it was not “The Campbells are Coming” which the band was playing that morning, but “Home Again,” and along the wide street, with an intimate sense of proprietorship that excluded strangers from this particular demonstration, people were saying: “It’s Tom Johnson, home from Europe!”