his two sons danced all night at the ball with which its opening was celebrated. . . .
And so, on that brilliant Sunday morning in September, as we entered the motor car in Columbus, with the impressions of the great meeting of that Saturday night still fresh and vivid in the mind, I could settle myself for the long drive back to Toledo over the white pikes that wound northward between the fair fields of our beautiful Ohio, and say to myself, over and over, with the delicious sensations of a secret, that the relief had almost come at last, and that now I could do the thing I loved to do—if only the people would approve the constitutional amendments at the election on Tuesday. There were the happiest of auguries in the sky; it was without a cloud to fleck its blue expanse, and the sun blazed and its light sparkled in the fresh air, and as we rode the fields swept by, the pastures still green, the ripening corn tall in maturity, nodding its heavy tassels and waving its broad leaves of dark green, the mown fields yellow with their stubble, and the wide land, somnolent and heavy with fecundity, already rich with the gold of autumn.
And the people did approve, with vast majorities, and among all the principles of democracy they wrote in their fundamental law that day was that of municipal home rule, so that all those cities, undreamed of when the old constitution had been written, and all those little towns, silent and sleepy in the drowse of that Sunday afternoon, might own and operate their public utilities, might draft their own charters, have what form of government they
