AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
ment when I learned that he had made an agreement not to perform the duties in person but by deputies, among whom the salary was to be divided—one of whom was Noll. I did not propose to be played with after that fashion, and, sending for James Pollock, asked him to take the place. He accepted and made an excellent official, attending to his duties in a business-like manner. Pollock was a friend of mine, but he had a caustic tongue which he did not endeavor to restrain, but rather indulged, and he had said many things which had made him obnoxious to Penrose, McNichol and Durham. Possibly no selection could have been more unsatisfactory to them, and after the end of my term they disposed of him by having an act passed to abolish the office.
On the 8th of June I made an address at Bellefonte, at the dedication of the monument to Andrew G. Curtin; and on the 17th presided over the jubilee in Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia, where, fifty years before, the Republican party held its first convention to nominate a candidate for the presidency. A number of men who voted for Fremont and Dayton were present, and Alexander K. McClure made a reminiscent address. J. Hampton Moore, a small, slim, intelligent and alert man, who had worked on a newspaper and graduated to a seat in congress, later introduced me as “our good governor.” I said:
We are met together to-day to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the organization of the Republican party, and we hold ourselves fortunate in having the presence of the survivors of those who participated in its earliest convention and of so many of its representatives who are honored by and lend honor to high official station. Fittingly we meet within the limits of that commonwealth in which the party had its origin and which, while receiving the least proportionate reward, has ever given to it the most continuous and effective support. Since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Pennsylvania has never cast an electoral vote against a candidate of the Republican party for the Presidency of the United States. The largest majority ever received by a
