Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/187

 platform which demanded a two-cent-a-mile railway fare and the taxation of railroad property at something like its value, or at least, he said the railroads should pay in taxes as much, relatively, as a man paid on his home; the poor man was paying on more than a sixty per cent. valuation while the railways were valued at eighteen or twenty per cent. This was dangerous, even revolutionary doctrine, of course, and Johnson was a single-taxer, supposed in Ohio to be a method of taxation whereby everybody would be relieved of taxation except the farmers who were to be taxed according to the superficial area of their farms. And of course Johnson was defeated, and yet within two years the legislature enacted the first of these proposals into law with but one dissenting vote. Thus heresy becomes orthodoxy. The proposal for taxation reform still waits, and will wait, I fancy, for years, since it is so fundamental, and mankind never attacks fundamental problems until it has exhausted all the superficial ones. And yet, while many other changes he contended for in his day have been made, while many of his heresies have become orthodoxies, the fear of him possessed the rural mind in the legislature until his death, and almost any measure could be defeated by merely uttering the formula "Tom Johnson."

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One remembers one's friends in various attitudes, and I see Tom Johnson now standing on the plat