I marvel when I reflect that he could see so clearly what most had not even the sensitiveness to feel. He went at his task quite in the scientific spirit, isolating first that elementary germ or microbe, the partizan, the man who always voted the straight ticket in municipal elections, the most virulent organism that ever infested the body politic and as unconscious of its toxic power as the bacillus of yellow fever. Then he discovered the foul culture this organism blindly breeds--the political machine, with its boss. But he went on and his quest led him to the public service corporation, the street railway company, the gas company, the electricity company, and then his trail led him out into the state, and he produced a series of studies of politics in the American cities which has never been equaled, and so had a noble and splendid part in the great awakening of our time. As long as his writings exposed only the low and the vulgar politicians, ward heelers and bosses, and the like, he was quite popular; I believe he was even asked to deliver addresses before clubs of the _dilettante_, and even in churches, for the righteous were terrible in their wrath. But when he went more deeply, when he exposed the respectable connections of the machine politicians, some of his admirers fell away, and stood afar off, like certain disciples of old. The citizen was delighted when some city other than his own was under the scrutiny of the sharp eyes that gleamed behind those round glasses, but when he drew near for a local study, there was an uplifting of the hands in pious horror. Cincinnati applauded the exposure of Minneapolis, and St. Louis was pleased to have Philadelphia reformed. Reform is popular so long as someone else is to be reformed. XXIX Steffens came to Toledo occasionally, and I recall an evening when we sat in my library and he told me of a certain editor with whom he had been talking; the editor had been praising his work with a fervor that filled Steffens with despair. “Must I write up every city in the United States before they will see?” he said. “If I were to do Toledo, how that chap would berate me!” He came to Toledo early in his investigations, and I took him to see Jones, and as we left the City Hall in the late afternoon of that spring day, Steffens was somehow depressed; we had walked a block in St. Clair Street in silence when he said: “Why, that man’s program will take a thousand years!”