It was his own employees who had gone forth to meet him, the men who worked for him in the street railway system he owned in Cleveland in those days, and I thought it rather a pretty compliment that a man’s employees should like him so well that they would turn out to welcome him with a band when he came home from his holiday abroad. I could understand their feeling when an hour later I saw Tom Johnson in the Hollenden Hotel, the center of a group of political friends; he seemed as glad as any of them to be back among so many Democrats. He still had his youth, and there was in his manner a peculiar, subtle charm, a gift with which the gods are rather stingy among the sons of men. I can see him now, his curly hair moist with the heat of the summer day, his profile, clear enough for a Greek coin, and the smile that never failed him, or failed a situation, to the end. He was, I think, in Congress in those days of which I am writing, or if he was not, he went to Congress soon after from one of the Cleveland districts. And while he was there he wrote a remarkable letter in response to a communication he had received from some girls who worked in a cloak factory in Cleveland, asking him to vote against the Wilson tariff bill when it was amended by adding a specific duty to the _ad valorem_ duty on women’s cloaks. The girls, of course, poor things, had not written the communication; it was written by the editor of a protectionist newspaper in Cleveland, and the response which Johnson sent was one of the simplest and clearest expositions of the evils of protection I ever read. I had read it when it was published, and had been delighted, but it was not for a dozen years that I was able to tell Johnson of my delight, and then one day as he and Dr. Frederic C. Howe and I were at luncheon I spoke of the letter. He laughed. “It was a great letter, wasn’t it?” he said. “Indeed it was,” I replied. “A wonderful letter,” he went on. “You know, it completely shut them up around here. The editor of that paper tried for weeks to reply to it, and then he gave it up, and he told me privately some time afterward that he was sure the theory of protection was right, but that it wouldn’t work on women’s cloaks. Yes, it was a great letter.” And then with a sigh, he added: “I wish I could have written such a letter. Henry George worked on that letter for days and nights before we got it to suit us; I’d think and think, and he’d write and write, and then tear up what he had written, but finally we got it down.”