AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
eminent qualifications, nor in obedience to the clamorous demands of the people, but that he was, so to speak, taken by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his inexpressibles by a friend or two and catapulted over the sacred pole which divides the Supreme Court from common mortals. Yet the Bench did not regard his unconventional entrance as a menace to its safety, nor when Justice Potter was appointed by his business partner to his high position did the Supreme Court flee in terror at his unceremonious entrance. On the contrary, he was deservedly popular. Every member of that court has gone upon the Bench, as the governor may go on it, by a nomination and election by his party. Every one of them was desirous and has endeavored to get there, and they were sent there to judicially administer justice, not to trail their gowns in the gutters of politics and to dictate the nomination and election of their associates. This, in my opinion, is the sentiment of the people in this contention of Justice Brown. If he is of a contrary opinion, let him resign his judgeship and go before the next Republican State Convention and before the people and test the question. He will be wiser afterward, and I can assure him the convention will be no more of a machine-made convention than the similar bodies which nominated him and his associates to their present positions. Were it not that Justice Brown in his interviews fences me, in common with many hundreds of Republicans in Pennsylvania outside of the fellowship of “decent people,” I might enter upon the ethics of the situation and the delicacies that accompany the high place he occupies. There is certainly a question whether the people have a right to take an officer from a place to which they have called him and command him to another. There is also a question whether, granted the right to take a judge from the court of common pleas and place him in the Supreme or Superior Court, the principle will not apply in the case of a governor and whether the acceptance of his office by a governor creates an implied contract with the people that he shall fill his allotted term, any more than does the acceptance of his office by a common pleas judge. This is pertinent, for five of the present members of the Supreme Court were elevated from the common pleas bench. But, I leave those matters for solution to the “decent people.” I have received but one letter from a judicial officer upon the Pennypacker controversy. It was from Judge Brown.
