Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/353

 their own experience. Many of them, including Dickson, had privately told me of their approval of my course with the newspapers. W. Righter Fisher had read law in my office. And yet, when the inevitable war followed, they deserted to the enemy almost at the first fire. It was a warning to me that in the trials of life it is unsafe to rely even upon friendship, upon long association, upon the judgment of men accustomed to reason. It was a justification of Warren in his dread of the North American.

The singular weakness of the document, the fact that the question they raised had already been determined in a way contrary to their thought was of little moment. The fact stared me in the face that, so far as they were concerned, I was left to fight my battles as I might alone. With respect to its contents, there is only need to point out that my letter to the Ledger did not announce an “intention of accepting the nomination,” that it did not announce a “candidacy” and that it did not express a “desire to return to the Bench.” These were only the mistaken newspaper interpretations, and the word “barter” was taken from the editorial of the Record, with that journal's unsound analysis of its own assumed facts. The standard of ethics which it was suggested that I ought to maintain, i. e., “that the mere knowledge that such a wish is cherished” operates “as official pressure” and, therefore, that I ought not to entertain such a wish, is an impossible standard. A few years later Charles E. Hughes went from the governorship of New York to the Supreme Court of the United States and not one of these friends of mine made a whimper about the possible impairment of the confidence of the people in the court. Moreover, my letter expressed no such wish. If their statement that they would be glad “under other circumstances” to further my wishes was intended as an implied promise, then I never heard that any one of them endeavored to carry it into effect. To do what they evidently wanted me to do, and to decline Rh