GOVERNOR, 1906
For a week or two the personal comment was quite delightful for the reason that these improvements in public life might lessen the power of the political opponents of the critics, and the approval lasted until I undertook to correct some wrong in the continuance of which they were interested. A poet wrote in the Pittsburgh Leader:
| Now blessings on |
| The man who so |
| Thinks up reforms |
| And makes them go; |
| He has his faults, |
| And who will say |
| That these his merits |
| Should outweigh? |
| Not so. At heart |
| The man is white. |
| Hail! Pennypacker! |
| You're all right! |
On the 3d of January I participated in the memorial meeting of the bar held in the Court of Common Pleas No. 2 and presided over by Chief Justice Mitchell, upon the death of Judge J. I. Clark Hare. Chief Justice Mitchell, John Samuel, Samuel Dickson, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Richard L. Ashhurst, George Tucker Bispham, William Righter Fisher, Henry R. Hatfield, William H. Staake and I made addresses. Ashhurst, a stout man, a gentleman of refinement and culture, who had had a military record at Gettysburg, who had been counsel for great railroad corporations, and later was postmaster in Philadelphia, leaving his cane behind him, upon an ocean pier at Atlantic City, disappeared in the ocean January 30, 1911, and was heard of no more.
In the message to the legislature I said:
