Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/22

 walked one hundred and seventy-five miles on a stretch, and have ridden down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the capitol to the White House, at the head of ten thousand men. I have carried on my back at one time twenty pounds of putty, and at another a musket. I have made pills in Kensington, thrown a load of wood into a Chestnut Street cellar, kept the books of an oil company, mowed weeds in a meadow, gathered a great library, written eighty books and pamphlets, tried men for murder, and sent sixty-six criminals to be hanged. Therefore is this story begun.

It pleases the vanity of men who have won some of the success of life to believe that they have been the architects of their own fortunes, and that the results are due to their individualities. The thought is pure error. Countless ages and almost infinite effort of unrecognized forces are required to make a man. His character and his physique he inherits, what he accomplishes depends upon the conditions that surround him more than upon the weight of his hand or the logic of his brain. I became Governor of Pennyslvania because one grandfather earned and gave to me the money with which to read law, and the other grandfather, in obedience to family traditions, took into his home and provided for a helpless child. The deeds of virtue, as well as the sins of the fathers, are visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generations. Consequently, if we wish to understand a man and his work, it is necessary to know how he came about and what there is back of him.

The people of Pennsylvania are more blended in race than those of any of the other American colonies. Biologists and breeders alike have learned the law of nature that the crossing of allied stocks leads to the increase of vital activities. To interbreed, or, as it is called, to keep a strain pure is to prevent further development. Substantially all of my American ancestors were residents of Pennsylvania, save a few from New Jersey, and in almost all of my lines they came to the country among the earliest settlers. But among them 16