In only one respect does This book follow a
sequence of time. It begins with two people
whom I should call political teachers. Their cre-
ative activities, the educational value of which
meant so much to contemporary politics, preceded
in time those of the other personalities in the
book.

This order of appearance I could hardly avoid,
since without the lessons I learned from these
pioneers I could not have comprehended nor could
I have personally known those who appear later.
Moreover, these men and others like them culti-
vated the ground from which many more recent
leaders have gathered the harvest.

Tom L. Johnson's name is now virtually un-
known except in the city in which he wrought
a revolution in government forty years ago. But
the ideas which he developed, in common with
others in the Middle West, have since swept over
the nation.

Beard was professionally a teacher, historian
and publicist, not a practitioner of politics. But
the impact of his ideas upon the political thinking
of our time his been definitive and immensely
important.

These two men were in a very real sense po-
litical teachers of the living present.

-2-