Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/184

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seeking to make mankind over, but since he has no model more attractive than himself to offer, his work never goes very far, and he returns to his warfare on the cigarette, or in moments of greater courage, on the poor girl whose figure flits by in the darkness, followed by the reformer's devouring eye.

But Steffens did not write us up, as the reporters phrase it. I think Jones perplexed him in those first days, though he knows now that Jones was wholly and I had almost said solely right. Jones indeed perplexed most of us. A man with a program of a thousand years could not be expected to interest so vitally our impatient democracy, as would one with a program so speedy and simple that it involved nothing more complex than putting all the bad people in jail; and there was always someone ready to point out the bad people, so that it seemed simple, as well it might to those who had forgotten that even that program is six thousand years old, at least, according to Archbishop Ussher's chronology. Steffens, however, was seeking types and in the two leading cities of Ohio he found them so perfect that he need never have gone further—had it not been for people like that fellow citizen of ours who filled Steffens with such despair. But while he was gathering his data on Cincinnati and on Cleveland he came to see us often, to our delight, and continued to come, so that he knew our city and our politics almost better than we knew them ourselves. He went to Cleveland, I remember, with some distinct prejudice against Tom Johnson; the prejudice so easily imbibed in gentlemen's clubs. But I was