Meanwhile Herbert Bigelow was increasingly prominent in political reform movement; he lectured everywhere, wrote articles for radical publications, organized the Ohio Direct Legislation League, and poured all his energy into the propaganda of the initiative and referendum. The privileged interests opposed him, of course, and still oppose him. One way they did it was to call him Reverend; whenever it was necessary to frighten "good" people, by holding up his image, they printed the Reverend with the subtle and sinister implication of quotation-marks; whenever it was necessary to influence "bad" people, printing the Reverend without the quotation-marks.
But Herbert Bigelow was an idealist growing day by day more practical. He had had hard knocks in boyhood; he knew what it was to be poor; he had a love of his fellow man; he was saddened and appalled by the shadow of poverty everywhere, the shadow which so many are too blind to see, or too selfish and cowardly to admit. But this spirit of sympathy and of pity in him had been somehow ordered, organized, and made coherent by the philosophy of Henry George, and when that vision came to him, as does nearly every other who has a vision, he went to work for social justice.
His great opportunity came when, last year, a convention was called to draft a new constitution for Ohio, and he set out to impress the people with the fact that it was their opportunity. He organized the Ohio Progressive Constitution League, with subsidiary leagues in every county; he worked all summer; and through that league, aided and inspired by what the lecturers call the Spirit of the Times, a majority of delegates elected to the convention were pledged to the principles of direct legislation.
And for the first half of the year Mr. Bigelow was at Columbus, presiding over the constitutional convention as its president. At forty his figure is no longer slender; it has taken on the rotundity of the middle years; but as he sat there in gray tweeds, with the yellow hair hanging over his forehead, smiling, it must have been gratifying to him now and then to reflect that his old heresies had become so orthodox in his own time. The convention adopted articles providing for home rule for cities, for a license system to control the liquor traffic, for equal suffrage, for verdicts in civil cases by a three-fourths vote of the jury, for the welfare of labor, and, under Mr. Bigelow's leadership, a clause adopting the initia-
