That which gathers the crowds and sets them shouting is not his
magnetism but the perfect expression of their passion. For them and
for it he is a sounding board. His voice with its hard angry tone,
its mechanical rise and fall, has the ring of a hundred guillotines
in operation. Having little culture, unintellectual, he is
primitive as the mass before him. He talks their language and an
instinct all his own gives him an exact sense of their emotions.

And what he says leaves the impression of tremendous sincerity. His
sincerity does not arise from reasoned convictions but from hatred;
deep and abiding hatred.

Senator Borah once said, "The difference between Johnson and me is
that I regard questions from the point of view of principles while
he regards them from the point of view of personalities. When a man
opposes me I do not become angry at him. On the next issue he may
agree with me. When a man opposes Johnson he hates him. He feels
that the opposition is directed personally against him, not against
the policy that separates them."

Johnson's opponents are the elements of reaction, the malefactors
of great wealth, the supporters of that social inequality which the
crowd resents. They stood in his path in California. They made
impossible his nomination at Chicago. When the bitter enders,
during the treaty fight, planned to send him on a tour of the
country, these monied men closed their pocketbooks, exclaiming to
Senator Knox, "What do you mean to do? Advertise this man Johnson
and make him the Republican candidate for President? Not with our
money."

Only the raising of a fund by Senator McCormick and some of the old
Progressives, gave him his chance to speak. He hates them and when
he attacks them it is with all the force and sincerity of his soul.
It is no mere question of hatred, such as Roosevelt would employ to
dramatize and make personal the issues he was representing to the
people; it is bitter, revengeful detestation. It makes Johnson the
most sincere man before the country to-day. And that pessimistic
strain in his nature causes the darkness of his diatribe to seem
all the more true.

But he swallows for expediency as other men swallow their
convictions for it, and wrath is the bitterer dose. During the 1920
campaign he trafficked with Senator Penrose, the representative of
hated wealth, for support at Chicago, offering, it has not been
disclosed what considerations, for his aid.

He was ready at