Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/172

 street railway franchises in several cities, and thus early in life he was almost ready for that most squalid of all poverty, mere possession. And then suddenly he had a marvelous experience, one that comes to few men; he caught a vision of a new social order.

He was on a railway train going from Indianapolis to New York, and the news agent on the train importuned him to buy a novel. Johnson waved him aside—I can imagine with what imperious impatience. But this agent was not to be waved aside; he persisted after the manner of his kind; he had that weird occult power by which the book agent weaves his spell and paralyses the will, even such a superior will as Tom Johnson's, and the agent sold to him, not a novel, but Henry George's "Social Problems." He was not given to reading; he read only for information, and even then he usually had some one else read to him. Once during his last illness he asked me what I was reading, and I told him Ferrero's "Rome," and tried to give him some notion of Ferrero's description of the political machine which Cæsar and Pompey had organized, and of the private fire department of Crassus, and he said: "Well, I'll have Newton read it to me." He used to wonder sometimes half wistfully, as though he were missing some good in life, how it was that I loved poetry so, and it was somehow consoling when Mr. Richard McGhee, that fine Irish member of Parliament, told me one night in the House of Commons that when Johnson made that last journey to England he had read Burns to him, and that Johnson