THE PHILADELPHIA BAR
fortune, having expended, according to reports, over a million dollars for his pictures. From the meetings, dinners, and clubs of the profession, he is always absent, and he takes no part in the bar associations or even in those efforts intended for professional advancement and improvement. His success at the bar has been due to physical and mental power rather than to cultivation. There is a little of coarseness, a little of hardness in his fiber, and he is not much given to sentiment in any direction, but he works at the law from early in the morning until late at night, and when he arises to argue or to try a case, the court, the jury, the lawyers and the tipstaves all give attention.
I took my part in the arguments at the Law Academy, was elected secretary for the year 1866, and then discovered that I had taken the wrong road for advancement. I have found as I have gone through life that the “rings,” for which we blame the politicians, arise naturally and are to be found everywhere. A little clique of cultivated men conducted the affairs of the Law Academy. From time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, an unbroken custom has decreed that he who had filled the office of prothonotary for one year should, if he so desired, be elected the president for the following year. At this time J. Vaughan Darling, in the office of Richard C. McMurtrie, who later went to Wilkes-Barre and there won success and died, held the position of prothonotary and superintended the serious labor of preparing all of the cases to be argued during the winter's sessions. Very innocently, with an inborn sense of personal superiority, I endeavored to take a part in the management and found myself against a stone wall. One evening in the course of a speech I used the word “gentleman.” Darling, in a supercilious way in reply, said that “Mr. Pennypacker will find that his ideas and ours of what constitute a gentleman are quite different.” The remark cost him the presidency. The membership of the Academy had felt such things before, were ready for revolt, and only
