Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/146

 of the entire spontaneity and simplicity with which this was done. It was, of course, tremendously effective as a bit of campaigning, but only because it was so wholly sincere. Five minutes later he was hotly debating with a working man who had interrupted him to accuse him of being unfair to union labor in his shops, and there was no coddling, no truckling, no effort to win or to please on his part, though he would take boundlessly patient pains to explain to anyone who really wanted to know anything about him or his official acts.

He was natural, simple and unspoiled, as naïve as a child, and "except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." He fully realized that the kingdom of heaven is within one's self; he was not looking for it, or expecting it anywhere outside of himself, certainly he was not expecting it in a political campaign, or in the mere process of being elected to an office. He regarded his office, indeed, only as an opportunity to serve, and he had been in that office long enough to have lost any illusions he may ever have had concerning it; one term will suffice to teach a man that lesson, even though he seek the office again.

He was like an evangelist, in a way, and his meetings were in the broad sense religious, though he had long since left his church, not because its ministers were always condemning him, but for the same reasons that Tolstoy left his church. His evangel was that of liberty. He had written a number of little songs. One of them, set to the tune of an old hymn he had heard in Wales as a boy, had a noble