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 some one 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!"
It did seem long to wait. There was a time when
