I recall now with what a confidential chuckle he said to me one time when he had been accused of I know not what vaulting and wicked ambition:
"I am politically ambitious; I have just one ambition; I want to be the mayor of a free city, and if I were, the very first thing I should do would be to appoint a corps of assessors who couldn't see a building, or an improvement; they would assess for taxation nothing but the value of the land, and we would try out the single tax."
He did not realize that ambition of course; no one ever realizes his ambition. But he did perhaps more than any other man in America to make possible the coming of the free city in this land.
His struggle for three-cent railway fares in Cleveland, which was but a roundabout method of securing municipal ownership in a state where the legislature in those days would not permit cities to own their public utilities was his great work. He lived to see that successful in a way, though not exactly in the way he had expected; that is another irony which the fates visit on the head of ambitious men.
And yet that irony of the fates is not always, after all, unkind. Somehow, after a while, in the lengthened perspective, the broadened vision that reveals a larger segment of the arc, the event is seen in better proportion. It requires faith in one's cause to see this always, and Johnson always had that faith. I shall not forget how when the people at last voted against him, he still could smile, and say to me: "The people are probably right." It was the last time I saw him. He was sick then, and
