all the legal burden of the long street railway controversy in Cleveland,—it was almost a civil war—and did it all with such skill and ability, and withal with such grace and courtesy and good nature that he never offended his opponents, who were the leading corporation lawyers of the city. Frederic C. Howe had been elected to the council in Cleveland as a Republican from one of the most aristocratic wards, but he was won over by Johnson's personality, was renominated by Johnson on the Democratic ticket, afterwards sent to the state senate and became one of the foremost men in the liberal movement in America; his books on municipal government are authorities. And Dr. Cooley; he was a Disciple preacher, and Johnson placed him at the head of the department of charities and corrections, so that, as Johnson used to say, instead of a preacher Dr. Cooley became a minister. It was delightful to be with them in those gatherings. The genuine reform of conditions in that city possessed them all like a passion; they were stimulated by a common ambition, which was, as Johnson used to say, to make Cleveland a city set on a hill, and though he was not a poet nor a maker of phrases everyone instinctively knew what he meant when he spoke of his city set on a hill. I do not know how much of history he had read, but he knew intuitively that the city in all ages has been the outpost of civilization, and that if the problem of democracy is to be solved at all it is to be solved first in the city. That was why he struggled for the free city, struggled to make the city democratic; he knew that the cure for the
