AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
anxious to have Roosevelt get the opportunity to talk to him. I am sure Penrose expected me to refuse. My reply was that if it were to be at my home, a different question would arise, but that this was not my private party, that it was proper the Press should be represented and Smith was a very suitable representative, and without any hesitation I promised to invite him. He accepted the invitation and came, altogether bland. It was after this dinner that the despatches referred to were re-written in the office of the Press.
It would be incorrect to suppose that the newspaper assaults, though generally understood, were without injurious effect upon the state and me. The impression made by an attack is not removed by disproof. The reputation of a woman is soiled not only by a fact but by a breath. In men, the old animal instincts lie very close to the surface and animals instinctively turn upon anything stricken. There were those, even among my associates, who had seen me succeed up to the present, but who began to doubt whether, in the face of such a storm, I would not be compelled to succumb. The assaults made it more difficult for me to secure such legislation as the apportionment of the state and the creation of the constabulary. They weakened the loyalty of some of my subordinates. They induced at one time some of the leading members of the Philadelphia bar to assume a critical attitude. They affected some of my personal friends, and with Colonel J. Granville Leach, two of whose sons I kept in station; Major William H. Lambert, with whom I had been most intimate and whom I had placed on the Board of City Trusts and in the council of the Historical Society and who had asked me to be his executor, and William Brooke Rawle, my relations were never quite the same afterward. They so influenced my successor, a well-meaning but timid man, that he felt that the main purpose of a governor was to see to it that he escaped with his life and a whole skin; and when Senator
