AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
tion of law.” In fact, I was as much abused by these interested commentators for selecting the most capable man in the state to represent it in the Senate as I was later for seeing to it that Pennsylvania had the most beautiful and most inexpensive state capitol in the country.
On the 11th of June I went to Pittsburgh to deliver an address and accept for the state the monument to Colonel Alexander Le Roy Hawkins and the dead of the Tenth Pennsylvania Regiment, which was the only regiment from the thirteen original states to participate in the war with Aguinaldo in the Philippines.
About this time I made an order that no more justices of the peace would be appointed without a statement in detail of the age, occupation and qualifications of the applicant, accompanied by certificates from residents of the neighborhood of his integrity and ability to perform the duties of the office.
It was a busy time and events crowded upon each other rapidly. On the 20th of June I was in Chicago as a delegate to the National Republican Convention. My rooms were in the Auditorium Hotel, where an agreeable impression was made by the Pompeiian room fitted up entirely with eastern ornamentation and a disagreeable impression was made by seeing the young men and young women, evidently of the cultivated classes, coming in to drink highballs and cocktails together as though it were quite the thing. The newspapers, in their efforts to suppress me because of the legislation making them responsible for negligence, had succeeded in producing the opposite result, and had given me an undeserved prominence. Governors Odell of New York, Herrick of Ohio, and Murphy of New Jersey came to my rooms, and it was reported: “The Governor was the striking figure in the hotel lobby and was the object of much attention.” The Pennsylvania delegation held a caucus and determined to vote as a unit. At this caucus I offered the following resolution:
