Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/341

 Union League in Philadelphia, where were Admirals Dewey, Higsbee and Melville and Generals Young, Bates, Brooke and Gregg and Governor Frank S. Black of New York.

I had now been governor for nearly a year and the newspaper act had been on the statute books for over six months, and up to this time no attack had been made impugning my integrity. This final step on the downward path to Avernus was now taken by the Philadelphia Record. One day I was at the rooms of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania when a man appeared who said he had been sent by the Record to show me a paper, and he asked me to read it. The paper purported to be signed by “A Lawyer” and it set forth “that Governor Pennypacker's appointment of Judge Thompson was prompted wholly by the selfish desire and indecent purpose of Governor Pennypacker to get the place for himself as soon as he can,” and “He, therefore, stooped to a plot that is absolutely without precedent or parallel in all the history of intrigue and corruption in Pennsylvania politics.” I read the paper over and handed it back to him.

“What are you going to do about it?” he inquired. He said nothing about money, but I inferred that was what he meant. Angry, I looked him in the eyes and said:

“I am not going to do anything about it.”

“Then we will print it.”

“Why do you tell me what you are going to print. I have no responsibility for what you print. That is your responsibility.”

The next day the Record, then edited by Theodore Wright, printed the communication with an editorial headed “A Foul Conspiracy,” and saying:

“It lays bare a plot to swap the governorship for a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court, as if the two highest offices in the gift of the people could be bartered or bought and sold with the indifferent regard for popular opinion or Rh