Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/148



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 of his personality in it—the newspapers refused to publish it; some of them would not publish it even as advertising, and he opened his campaign on the post office corner, standing bare-headed in the March wind, his son Paul blowing a saxophone to attract a crowd. Many of his old supporters were falling away; it seemed for a time that he alone would have to make the campaign without any to speak for him on the stump; far otherwise than in that second campaign, when, after having been counted out in the Republican convention, he had run for the first time independently, a "Man Without a Party," as he called himself; and thousands, themselves outraged by the treatment his own party had accorded him, in the spirit of fair play had rallied to his standard.

But now things had changed, and an incident which occurred at the beginning of this campaign was significant of the feeling toward him, though in all kindness it most not be told in detail. There