Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/387

 forever to be talking about his city set on a hill. If Johnson's phrase was in an old poetic strain Jones meant literally what he said. He used to talk of the crowds he had seen along the boulevards of Paris, and the gayety, impossible to us, in which they had celebrated the 14th of July, and he talked of all this to such purpose that Toledo became the first city in America to have a "sane" Fourth of July.

Jones and Johnson, because they had vision, were thinking in sequences far beyond the material conceptions of the communities about them, and utterly impossible to skulking city politicians, with their miserable little treacheries and contemptible and selfish ambitions. They were imagining a spirit which might and perhaps some day will possess a whole people. And when I intimated the pity it was that they had not lived to see that silvery September day when the people of Ohio voted for municipal autonomy, I did not mean in the least to aver that their dream had been realized for us, simply because we had secured an amendment to our fundamental law. Memoranda to this effect had been noted on the roll of the constitution, but these after all were but the cold, formal and unlovely terms that expressed concepts which had been evolving slowly in the public consciousness.

They realized, what all intelligent men must ere long apprehend, that too great stress has been laid on mere political activity. We have counted it as of controlling force in human affairs, the energy behind human activities, the cause, instead of the