The age-herald., 1901-09-02
JoHNsoN AND HANNA.

l From the New York Journal.
 Tom Johnson is fat and determined and halls from Ohio.
 Mark Hanna will be nominated for President by the Republicans, according to the very best opinions. Mark Hanna is of the opinion that he will be nominated, and his opinion Is the very best in all matters concerning the Republican party
 How amusing-should Tom Johnson be nominated by the Democratic party to run against Mark Hanna.
 Two successful business men would fight with their pocketbooks, with thick necks and with desperate earnestness to get the people to give them an office-and neither would know what to do with 1t when he got it.
 Tom Johnson. if elected, would try to change things around suddenly, and would discover that you can't change the course of events ahead of time. The difference between Tom Johnson at large and Tom Johnson in the White House. as wise man once remarked would be the diff ference between a mule kicking up his heels deiantly in an open lot and a mule hitched to 4000 pounds of sand = 1000 pounds of sand or 4000 pounds Of respon- sibility will sober any man and any mule.
 Mark Hanna, if elected--and we are in- clined to think that he will be elected, unless his present government should shoot too many strikers between now and 1S04-would be like frog that was elected president of the stream
 He would sit on the edge of the stream and watch 1t run along in its plutocratic course toward the natural and inevitable ocean of government ownership. The contest between Hanna and John son would be a pretty struggle to witness
 But we shall never witness that strug- gle for this very interesting reason:
 Tom Johnson possesses one good idea. That one good idea alone makes him ir- eligible for the Presidency. At the bottom of one of the deepest folds of Johnson's cerebrum-and it is not so deep-resides a belief in Henry Georges theory that the earth should be- long to all the people on 1t, and not to any individual.
 Tom Johnson has repeatedly confessed his adherence to this belief.
  liam Waldorf Astor, who never comes to America. should not be permitted to own $50, 600 GOO worth of New Yorks real estate. He believes perhaps without quite knowing why-that the mother who brings | five children into the world In New York tenement should not scrub or wash five times as hard in order to satisfy William Waldorf Astor, who "owns'' the land and spends the scrub woman's money In Eng | land
 | This Is Tom Johnson's one conviction, and we do not see how he can possibly get rid of It or cause people to forget 1t before 1904.
 And this one conviction, this one honest idea, bars him from all Presidential as- l pirations.
 To be President you must be a great man, and all the people must know it. you must be Washington, Jackson or Grant.
 Or you must be an absolutely colorless man and people must know nothing about you; and, above all. you must not have one single good idea.
 The small, selfish creatures who think they own land, and who are really owned by the worms, who are waiting in the land for them, would beat Tom Johnson if he should run for the Presidency just as surely as the sun would melt small icicle if the icicle should come against 1t.
 And that is a fact that is really amus- ing and worth thinking about, consider ing that the American people delude themselves Into the idea that they really think for themselves-that they really ad-