its elemental passion.

Turbulent popular feeling is breath in Johnson's nostrils. Twice he
has thoroughly enjoyed its intoxication.

His political life was blank paper when the tumult of popular
indignation swept California at the time Francis J. Heney, who was
prosecuting the San Francisco grafters, was shot in the court room.
He had thought nothing politically, he had felt nothing
politically. He had neither convictions, nor passions, nor morals,
politically speaking. He grew up in soil which does not produce
lofty standards. Something of the mining-camp spirit still hung
over California, which had been settled by adventurers, forty-niners,
gold seekers, men who had left the East to "make a new start" where
there was pay dirt. The State had a wild zest for life which was
untrammeled by Puritanism. San Francisco had its Barbary Coast
and in every restaurant its private dining rooms for women.
Johnson himself was sprung from a father who was a "railroad
lawyer," the agent of privileges in procuring special favors, by
methods once well known, from the state legislature. The atmosphere
of his youth was not one to develop a sensitive conscience or a
high conception of public morals.

Johnson at this time was a practicing attorney, not noted for the
quality of his community service. The administration of San
Francisco had been a scandal for years. Few cared. It was a
"corrupt and contented" city. The corruption grew worse. Lower and
meaner grafters rose to take the place of the earlier and more
robust good fellows who trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost
class, and lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its
shocking indecency. The light and licentious town developed a
conscience. Public indignation arose and reached its height, when
the grafters ventured too far in the shooting of the attorney
charged with their prosecution.

Johnson then felt for the first time something he had never felt
before--the stirring of the storm of angry popular feeling. It woke
something in him, something that he did not know existed before--his
instinct for the expression of public passion; his love of the
platform with yelling multitudes in front of him.

He threw himself into the fray on the side of civic virtue. The
disturbance to the complacency of San Francisco disturbed the
complacency of the State, which had calmly endured misgovernment
for many years. Misgovernment procured by the railroad, the public
utility corp