Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/313

 wearing the prison stripes (the legislature of the state) was whispering in my ear and tendering me a chain to fasten around her beautiful limbs. I granted the request for a hearing and fixed it for the 21st of April in the hall of the House of Representatives. At that time George Nox McCain wrote: “I faced the most imposing array of journalistic talent and ability that any Governor of Pennsylvania ever greeted.” The bill was supported by Richard C. Dale and Alexander Simpson, Jr., able lawyers, and Charles Emory Smith had been selected to represent the newspapers. Smith was a man of commonplace ability, with a round, good-looking face, dark eyes and a pleasing voice which could make the most ordinary and conventional utterances sound as though they had some meaning. To evolve an idea was beyond him and he never undertook the task. He had gone in youth from Connecticut to New York, and later had come from New York to Philadelphia and, like many others whom I shall not undertake to mention, he was forever seeking to make Pennsylvania take on the aspects of the place of his birth, which he had abandoned because it afforded him no opportunities. If Smith had been at all a wise man he would have said that the bill had no terrors for newspapers like the Press, he would have welcomed an effort at improvement beneficial to real journals and would have left the odium to be borne by such sheets as the North American, whose standing was such that if ever any decent person was caught reading it he excused himself by saying that he had picked it up on the cars. But there was an appeal to his vanity. He was made to believe that he would stand forth hereafter as the defender of the liberty of the press alongside of those heroes in the past who had confronted real dangers. Since the danger had disappeared, all of this was opera bouffe, but Smith was a serious-minded man, with little sense of humor, and he failed to catch this aspect of the situation. He committed his speeches to memory. I have heard him many times, and his orations Rh