It was a power that was felt in that House. They tried to shelve him; they put him on the committee for the District of Columbia, and no shelf could have pleased him more, or been better suited to his peculiar genius, for it gave him a city to deal with. The very first thing he did was to investigate the revenues of the District, and he made a report on the subject, based on the theories underlying the proposition of the single tax. He tried to have the single tax adopted for the District, and while he failed in that design his report is a classic on the whole subject of municipal taxation, even if, like most classics, it is little read. He made some splendid speeches, too, on the tariff, and by a clever device, under the rule giving members leave to print what no one is willing to hear, he contrived, with the help of several colleagues, to distribute over the land more than a million copies of Henry George’s “Protection and Free Trade,” giving that work a larger circulation than all the six best sellers among the romantic novels. It is one of the peculiar weaknesses of our political system that our strongest men cannot be kept very long in Congress, and it was Johnson’s fate to be defeated after his second term, but he then entered a field of political activity which was not only thoroughly congenial to him, but one in which for the present the struggle for democracy must be carried on. That field is the field of municipal politics which he entered just at the time of the awakening which marked the first decade of the new century. XXVIII When I think of the beginning of that period my thought goes back to an afternoon in New York, when, sitting in the editorial rooms of _McClure’s Magazine_, Lincoln Steffens said to me: “I’m going to do a series of articles for the magazine on municipal government.” “And what do you know about municipal government?” I asked in the tone a man may adopt with his friend. “Nothing,” he replied. “That’s why I’m going to write about it.” We smiled in the pleasure we both had in his fun, but we did not talk long about municipal government as we were to do in the succeeding years; we had more interesting subjects to discuss just then.