Forty Years Of It - free ebook by Brand Whitlock

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Forty Years Of It

Brand Whitlock

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FORTY YEARS OF IT

FORTY YEARS OF IT

Copyright, 1914, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1913, by The Phillips Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER ELIAS D. WHITLOCK WHO DIED DECEMBER 23, 1913 A MINISTER OF THE SANCTUARY, AND OF THE TRUE TABERNACLE, WHICH THE LORD PITCHED, AND NOT MAN...

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INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

The history of democracy’s progress in a mid-Western city—so, to introduce this book in specific terms, one perhaps inevitably must call it. Yet in using the word democracy , one must plead for a distinction, or, better, a reversion, indicated by the curious anchylosis that, at a certain point in their maturity, usually sets in upon words newly put in use to express some august and large spiritual reality. We all know how this materializing tendency, if one may call it that, has affected our not

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I

I

One hot afternoon in the summer of my tenth year, my grandfather, having finished the nap he was accustomed to take after the heavy dinner which, in those days, was served at noon in his house, told me that I might go up town with him. This was not only a relief, but a prospect of adventure. It was a relief to have him finish his nap, because while he was taking his nap, my grandmother drew down at all the windows the heavy green shades, which, brought home by the family after a residence in Nur

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II

II

Now that I have set down, with such particularity, an incident which I could not wholly understand nor reconcile with the established order of things until many years after, I am not so sure after all that I witnessed it in that Urbana of reality; it may have been in that Urbana of the memory, wherein related scenes and incidents have coalesced with the witnessed event, or in that Macochee of certain of my attempts in fiction, though I have always hoped that the fiction was the essential reality

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III

III

My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever those duties

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IV

IV

Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture, influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished, because so many of its students came from the southern states. It declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the college itself continued

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V

V

But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young, fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that had sunk into

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VI

VI

The incalculable influence of the spoken word and the consequent responsibility that weighs upon the lightest phrase have so long been urged that men might well go about with their fingers on their lips, oracular as presidential candidates, deliberating each thought before giving it wing. And yet, as Carlyle said of French speech, the immeasurable tide flows on and ebbs only toward the small hours of the morning. Though even then in certain quarters, the tide does not ebb, and in those hours tru

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VII

VII

In speaking of the group of newspaper writers who formed the Whitechapel Club, augmented as they were by artists, and musicians and physicians and lawyers, I would not give the impression that they were in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding spirit which too often inspires that species. They were, indeed, wisely otherwise, and they were, I think, wholly right minded in their attitude toward what are called public questions, and of these they had a deep and perspicacious u

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VIII

VIII

Those who are able to recall the symposium of these minds will no doubt always see the humorous face of Charlie Seymour as the center of the coterie, a young man with such a flair for what was news, with such an instinct for word values, such real ability as a writer, and such a quaint and original strain of humor as to make him the peer of any, a young man who would have gone far and high could he have lived. An early fate overtook him, as it overtook Charlie Perkins and Charlie Almy and Ben Ki

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IX

IX

It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil f

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X

X

However, there were other interests and other delights with which to occupy one’s self meanwhile, not the least of which was Mr. Butterworth himself. He was then out of Congress and in Chicago as Solicitor General of the World’s Columbian Exposition, for which Chicago was preparing. For a while I was relieved from writing about politics, and assigned to the World’s Fair, and there were so many distinguished men from all over the nation associated in that enterprise that it was very much like pol

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XI

XI

That was the legislature which elected John M. Palmer to the United States Senate from Illinois. The election was accomplished only after a memorable deadlock of two months in which the Democrats of the general assembly stood so nobly, shoulder to shoulder, that they were called “The Immortal 101.” When they were finally reënforced by the votes of two members elected as representatives of the Farmers’ Alliance, and elected their man, they had a gold medal struck to commemorate their own heroism.

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XII

XII

Senator Palmer’s victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-democratic movement in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times. It was on a cold raw morning that I met Joseph P. Mahony, then a Democratic member of the State Senate, who said: “Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the next governor of Illinois.” It was the time of year when one was meeting

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XIII

XIII

It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except inferentially, that I learned this, but among some musty documents the worms were eating up away down in the foundations of the State House. My work in the office of the secretary of state involved the care of the state’s archives. The oldest of these were stored in a vault in the cellar of the huge pile, and the discovery had just been made that some kind of insect, which the state entomologist knew all about, was riddling those re

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XIV

XIV

The newspapers were so extravagant in their abuse of Governor Altgeld for his pardon of the anarchists that one not knowing the facts might have received the impression that the Governor had already pardoned most of the prisoners in the penitentiary, and would presently pardon those that remained, provided the crimes they had committed, or were said to have committed, had been heinous enough. The fact was that he issued no more pardons, proportionately at least, than the governors who preceded h

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XV

XV

The incident, like that on which the story itself was founded, occurred in the course of another effort to induce the Governor to save a poor wretch from the gallows. The autumn preceding, just when the World’s Fair at Chicago was at its apogee, a half-crazed boy had assassinated Carter Harrison, the old mayor of that city, and had been promptly tried and condemned to death. The time for the execution of the sentence drew on, and two or three days before the black event I had a telegram from Pet

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XVI

XVI

However, it has seemed to be my fate, or my weakness, which we too often confuse with fate, to vacillate between an interest in letters and an interest in politics, and after that year, whose days and nights were almost wholly given to studying law, I was admitted to the bar, and thereupon felt qualified to go out on the stump in the campaign that autumn and speak in behalf of the Democratic ticket. It was fun to drive out over Sangamon County in those soft autumn evenings, over the soft roads,—

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XVII

XVII

Politics in those days—and not alone in those days either—were mean, and while I do not intend to say that this meanness bowed me with despair, it did fill me with disgust, and made the whole business utterly distasteful. Politics were almost wholly personal, there was then no conception of them as related to social life. An awakening was coming, to be sure, and the signs were then apparent, even if but few saw them. They were to most quite dim; but there were here and there in the land dreamers

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XVIII

XVIII

That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no comedy, of course, to th

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XIX

XIX

It was regarded as a triumph for the Humane Society,—the newspapers had printed accounts of the trial,—but it was a victory of which I felt pretty much ashamed; it all seemed so useless, so absurd, so barbarous, when you came to think of it, and what good it had done Maria, or anyone, it was difficult to determine. And so, before very long, I went to the workhouse board and had Rheinhold paroled, and he disappeared, vanished toward the West, and was never heard of more. Meanwhile Maria lived on

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XX

XX

There was, however, in Toledo one man who could sympathize with my attitude; and that was a man whose determination to accept literally and to try to practice the fundamental philosophy of Christianity had so startled and confounded the Christians everywhere that he at once became famous throughout Christendom as “Golden Rule Jones.” I had known of him only as the eccentric mayor of our city, and nearly everyone whom I had met since my advent in Toledo spoke of him only to say something disparag

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XXI

XXI

It was our interest in the disowned, the outcast, the poor, and the criminal that drew us first together; that and the fact that we are gradually assuming the same attitude toward life. He was full of Tolstoy at that time, and we could talk of the great Russian, and I could introduce him to the other great Russians. He was then a little past fifty, and had just made the astounding discovery that there was such a thing as literature in the world: he had been so busy working all his life that he h

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XXII

XXII

And yet somebody after all did care about all those miserable souls who are immured in the terrible prisons which society maintains as monuments to the strange and implacable hatred in the breast of mankind; perhaps, in the last chapter of these vagrant memories, I allowed to creep into my utterance some of the old bitterness which now and then would taint our efforts, do what we might. And that is not at all the note I would adopt, though it used at times to be very difficult not to do so; one

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XXIII

XXIII

There was something pathetic in that last campaign, the pathos, perhaps, of the last phase. The long years of opposition had begun to tell: there was a strong determination to defeat him. He had not wished to stand again for the office, but, after the Toledo custom, there had been presented to him an informal petition, signed by several thousand citizens, asking him to do so, and he had consented. But when he wrote a statement setting forth his position—it was a document with the strong flavor o

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XXIV

XXIV

Besides these interesting topics there was the subject of municipal home rule. This had already become vital in Toledo because, a year or so before, the Republican party organization through its influence in the state, without having to strain its powers of persuasion, had induced the legislature to pass a special law which deprived the Mayor of Toledo of his control of the police force and vested the government of that body in a commission appointed by the governor of the state. It had been, of

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XXV

XXV

In the beginning, of course, it was inevitable that Jones should have been called a Socialist. I suppose he did not care much himself, but the Socialists cared, and promptly disowned him, and were at one with the capitalists in their hatred and abuse of him. He shared, no doubt, the Socialists’ great dream of an ordered society, though he would not have ordered it by any kind of force or compulsion, but in that spirit which they sneer at as mere sentimentalism. He was patient with them; he saw t

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XXVI

XXVI

I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done. Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presented the uniqu

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XXVII

XXVII

I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the Chicago Herald , and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state, many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning—I think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton county delegation h

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XXVIII

XXVIII

When I think of the beginning of that period my thought goes back to an afternoon in New York, when, sitting in the editorial rooms of McClure’s Magazine , Lincoln Steffens said to me: “I’m going to do a series of articles for the magazine on municipal government.” “And what do you know about municipal government?” I asked in the tone a man may adopt with his friend. “Nothing,” he replied. “That’s why I’m going to write about it.” We smiled in the pleasure we both had in his fun, but we did not

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XXIX

XXIX

Steffens came to Toledo occasionally, and I recall an evening when we sat in my library and he told me of a certain editor with whom he had been talking; the editor had been praising his work with a fervor that filled Steffens with despair. “Must I write up every city in the United States before they will see?” he said. “If I were to do Toledo, how that chap would berate me!” He came to Toledo early in his investigations, and I took him to see Jones, and as we left the City Hall in the late afte

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XXX

XXX

One remembers one’s friends in various attitudes, and I see Tom Johnson now standing on the platform in the old tent, under the flaring lights, with the eager crowd before him—there were never such intelligent audiences to speak to as those in Cleveland, unless it were those in Toledo—and he was at his best when the crowd was heckling him. He was like Severus Cassius, who, as Montaigne says, “spoke best extempore, and stood more obliged to fortune than his own diligence; it was an advantage to h

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XXXI

XXXI

The best of life, no doubt, is made up of memories, as M. George Cain says, and perhaps that is why I have lingered so long over these little incidents of Sam Jones and Tom Johnson. I have told them in no sort of related order; Jones died years before Johnson; but somehow they seem to me to have appeared simultaneously, like twin stars in our northern sky, to have blazed a while and then gone out together. Different as their personalities were, different as two such great originals must have bee

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XXXII

XXXII

The predilection of the Ohio man for politics, I believe, is well known in this land, where it is generally identified with a love for office. There is a reproach implied in the reputation which we perhaps deserve. An Ohio man goes into politics as naturally as a Nova Scotian goes to sea, and yet not all Nova Scotians go to sea. They all love the sea perhaps, but they do not all care to become sailors. And so with us Ohioans. We all love politics, though fortunately we do not all care to hold of

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XXXIII

XXXIII

I have spoken of the Independents as though they were an authentic political party, when it was one of their basic principles to be no party at all. They were Republicans and Democrats who, in the revelation of Jones’s death, had come to see that it was the partizan that was responsible for the evil political machines in American cities; they saw that by dividing themselves arbitrarily into parties, along national lines, by voting, almost automatically, their party tickets, ratifying nominations

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XXXIV

XXXIV

As I sat and looked out over the crowds that poured from the shops and stood, sometimes for the whole of the noon hour, in discomfort perhaps if the wind was off the lake, and saw the veritable hunger for life that was in their faces, a hunger surely which no political or economic system, however wise and perfect, could satisfy, I could not help thinking that it was a pity the clergy did not understand these people better, for, after all, the message of the Carpenter who came out of Nazareth was

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XXXV

XXXV

The most efficient executive of which there is any record in history is clearly that little centurion who could say: “For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers; and I say unto one, go, and he goeth; and to another, come, and he cometh; and to my servant, do this, and he doeth it.” In my experience as an executive I learned that it was easy to say “Go,” but that the fellows did not go promptly; I could say “Come,” and he came—after a while, perhaps, when I had said “Come”

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XXXVI

XXXVI

The first thing was to get men who could do the work, a difficulty made greater because we have been accustomed to bestow public offices as rewards for political service; the office is for the man, not the man for the office. I had a friend, a young man, who had never been in politics in his life, though he had been born and reared in Ohio. He was of an old, wealthy and aristocratic family, a graduate of an eastern university. His name was Franklin Macomber. I appointed him a member of the Board

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XXXVII

XXXVII

I went into the mayor’s office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer’s participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land, where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience, when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The condition I supp

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XXXVIII

XXXVIII

However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes, separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel, a confusion of tongues

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XXXIX

XXXIX

The disadvantages of being classed as a reformer are not, I am sure, sufficiently appreciated; if they were the peace of the world would not be troubled as constantly as it is by those who would make mankind over on a model of which they present themselves as the unattractive example. One of those advantages is that each reformer thinks that all the other reformers are in honor committed to his reform; he writes them letters asking for expressions of sympathy and support, and, generally, when he

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XL

XL

These observations come with the recollection of those days of my first term in the mayor’s office when I had so much to do with reformers that I earnestly desired that no one would ever include me in their category. They came to see me so often and in such numbers that my whole view of life was quite in danger of distortion. It seemed that half the populace had set forth in a rage to reform mankind, and their first need was to get the mayor to use the police force to help them. When they did no

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XLI

XLI

I suppose the discussion is one which must go on always in any land where the people of our race and tradition dwell. A more objective, natural and naïve people would not be so interested in sin, and when the late Mayor Gaynor of New York spoke of the difficulty of administering the affairs of a modern city according to “the standard of exquisite morals” held aloft by some persons for others, he designated in his clear and clever way a class of citizens familiar to every mayor by the curiously d

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XLII

XLII

Speaking of this passion for laws and regulations and how some of the zealous would order even the most private and personal details of life in these states, Mr. Havelock Ellis, in a brilliant chapter of his work, “The Task of Social Hygiene,” takes occasion to observe that “nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral regulation of social affairs in the hands of police,” and that “nowhere are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.” The difficulty is d

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XLIII

XLIII

I used to recall, during the early and acute phase of this discussion, an incident that occurred in the old Springfield days in Loami, down in the Sangamon country. The little village in those days could boast an institution unlike any, perhaps, in the land, unless it were to be found in some small hamlet in the South. In the public square, on a space worn smooth and hard as asphalt, a great circle was drawn, and here, every day when the weather was fine, a company of old men gathered and played

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XLIV

XLIV

It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform administration, or an administration elected as a protest against the evils of machine government, boss rule, and the domination of public service corporations, is immediately confronted by the demand of those who call themselves the good people to enforce all the sumptuary laws and to exterminate vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies and representatives seek to divert the attention of the administration from themselves and th

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XLV

XLV

When I referred to the general rule that policemen are disliked and condemned I should have noticed certain exceptions. The traffic squad for instance is generally held in a respect and affection that is part of the civic pride of the community. Those fine big fellows on the corner, waving this way or that with a gesture the flowing traffic of the street, are greeted with smiles, and, as they assist in the perilous passage of the thoroughfares, sometimes with thanks and benedictions. The reason,

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XLVI

XLVI

The questions put to Lawler were perhaps no more absurd than many a one framed by civil-service examiners. In any event the written examination is apt to do as much harm as good, and for policemen and firemen we came to the conclusion that it was almost wholly worthless, once it had been determined that an applicant could write well enough to turn in an intelligible report. The initial qualification on which we came to rely and to regard as most important was the physical qualification. There is

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XLVII

XLVII

In no respect has the utter impotence of medieval machinery in suppressing vice been more definitely proved than in the great failure of society in dealing with what is called the social evil. Whenever my mind runs on this subject, as anyone’s mind must in the present recrudescence of that Puritanism which never had its mind on anything else, I invariably think of Golden Rule Jones and the incidents in that impossible warfare which worried him into a premature grave. He was an odd man, born so f

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XLVIII

XLVIII

To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution had not become a subject for polite conversation at the dinner table; pornographic vice commissions had not been organized and provided with appropriations so that their hearings might be stenographically reported and published along with the filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of cities by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered that the marriage ceremony required a new introduction, based upon the scientific investigatio

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XLIX

XLIX

It is a subject which only the student of morbid psychology, I suppose, can illuminate properly, but I fancy he would find somewhere a significance in the phrase “white slave,” when acted upon by minds that had never been refined enough to imagine any but the grossest of objective crimes, and out of all this there arose a new conception of the prostitute quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She was no longer the ruined and abandoned thing she once was, too vile for any contact with the

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L

L

And these laws have not only failed, they have not only stimulated and intensified the evil, but they themselves have created a white slavery worse than that of the preposterous tales and sentimental twaddle that circulate among the neurotic, a white slavery worse than any ever imagined by the most romanticistic of the dime novelists or by the most superheated of the professional reformers. Every one of these laws has been devised, written and enacted in the identical spirit with which the Purit

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LI

LI

In taking the present occasion to say so much about the work in morals which a mayor is expected to perform, I have a disquieting sense that I have fallen into a tone too querulous for the subject, and perhaps taken a mean advantage of the reader in telling of my troubles. It is rather a troubled life that a mayor leads in one of these turbulent American cities, since so much of his time is taken up by reformers who seem to expect him somehow to do their holy work for them, and yet that is doubt

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LII

LII

It is, however, a curious characteristic of our people, or of the vocal minority of them, that while they insist on every possible interference with every private and personal right, in the field of moral conduct, they nevertheless will tolerate no interference whatever with property rights. Thus it was precisely as Cossacks that many employers of labor insisted on my using the police to cow their workmen whenever there was a strike. During my first term it befell that our city was torn by strik

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LIII

LIII

There was one of the employers, indeed, who grew so alarmed that he came one morning to the office predicting a riot at his plant, that very afternoon at five o’clock, when the works were to shut down for the day. This man was just then operating his factory with strike breakers and he was concerned for their safety. Indeed his concern was expressed in the form of a personal sympathy and love for them which was far more sentimental than any I had ever been accused of showing toward workingmen. H

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LIV

LIV

It was because of this attitude toward workingmen, and their cause, that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist class and had done w

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LV

LV

But I would not be unfair, and I counted many friends among the Socialists of my town and time whose best ideals one could gladly share. They were immensely intelligent, or immensely informed; they had made a fairly valid indictment against society as it is organized, or disorganized. But like Mr. H. G. Wells, who calls himself a Socialist, these exceptions, in Mr. Wells’s words, were by no means fanatical or uncritical adherents. To them as to him Socialism was a noble, and yet a very human and

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LVI

LVI

As a boy, thirty years ago, I used to observe, with a boy’s interest, the little bob-tailed street cars that went teetering and tinkling, at intervals of half an hour, out a long street that ran within a block of my home. I watched the cars intently, and so intently that the impressions of their various colors, sounds and smells have remained with me to this day, speaking, in a way, of the conditions of a small American city of that time, and affording a means by which to measure that progress i

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LVII

LVII

It had been an issue, as I have more than once said in Jones’s time and in his campaigns, though the issues his tremendous personality raised were so vast and so general and so fundamental that they included all issues, as Emerson said his reform included all reforms. It ran like a scarlet thread through the warp and woof of our communal life; it was somehow associated with the ambitions of the meanest politician, it affected the fortunes of every man in business, and it was the means whereby th

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LVIII

LVIII

Meanwhile, the education of the general mind went on, and we were, after all, tending somewhither. Our experience in the greatest of our tasks demonstrated that, and in the change that gradually took place in sentiment concerning the street railway problem, there was an evidence of the development of a mass consciousness, a mass will, which some time in these cities of ours will justify democracy. It is of course the most difficult process in the world, for a mass of two hundred thousand people

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LIX

LIX

Those men who ventured early into the street-car business were pioneers; they assumed large risks, and they rendered a public service. They had the courage to undertake experiments; they had faith that the town would grow and become in time a city. And they staked all on the chance. They had little difficulty, if they had any at all, in securing franchises from the city to use the streets, for the people of the city were glad to have the convenience of transportation. Indeed many of the lines we

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LX

LX

We came upon the scene just when the discussion was emerging from the second into the third of those phases into which I have divided the development of the problem. The franchises granted almost a generation before were about to expire, and new arrangements between the city and the traction company, the Big Con, as the newspaper argot would have it. Chicago had already, or almost, gone through her settlement; and though the settlement was pretty bad, it nevertheless recognized the principle tha

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LXI

LXI

Meanwhile, the franchises were expiring, and the time drew on when the company would have no rights left in the streets. And here was the opportunity for the mind that had the power, or the defect, of isolating propositions, of regarding them as absolute, of ignoring the intricate relativity of life. “Put the company off the streets,” was the cry; “make it stop running its cars; bring it to its knees.” However, we could not bring the company to its knees without bringing the riders to their feet

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LXII

LXII

A few weeks after my election to a fourth term I wrote out and gave to the reporters a statement in which I said that I would not be again a candidate for the office of mayor. I had been thinking of my old ambition in letters, and of those novels I had planned to write. Already I had been six years in office and I had not written a novel in all that time. And here I was, just entering upon another term. If ever I were to write those novels I would better be about it, before I grew too old and to

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LXIII

LXIII

It was of the Free City they had dreamed and that they had not lived to behold the fulfillment of their dream was, in its way, the final certification of the validity of their services as pioneers. It is an old rule of life, or an old trick of the fates that seem so casually to govern life, that the dreams of mortals are seldom destined to come true, though mortals sometimes thwart the fates by finding their dreams in themselves sufficient. In this sense Jones and Johnson had already been reward

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