THE PHILADELPHIA BAR
Democrats than among the Republicans. But unquestionably it was a grave crisis happily surmounted.”
MacVeagh's attack did not meet the approval of those present; and Judge Mitchell said, hardly in undertones: “I have a good deal of patience, but it provokes me; it is as much as I can stand, to sit here and listen to MacVeagh talking his Independent Republican politics.”
The Constitution of the United States having been adopted in a convention held in Philadelphia in 1787, and from the national point of view this being the most important event in our history, it was determined to celebrate the centennial anniversary in a fitting manner in 1887. J. Granville Leach offered a resolution in the Law Academy that the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States be entertained by the bar of the city. The project took shape. McMurtrie was made chairman, Joseph B. Townsend, treasurer, and Pennypacker, secretary, of a committee to carry out the plan, but Leach and I did all the work. We gathered in the subscriptions by personal solicitation at ten dollars each, and made the arrangements. We gave the Justices a breakfast in the foyer of the Academy of Music on the fifteenth of September at which the Chief Justice, Morrison R. Waite, Richard C. McMurtrie, Judge J. I. Clark Hare, President Judge of the Court of Common Pleas No. 2; Justice Edward M. Paxson of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the Honorable W. S. Kirkpatrick, Attorney General of Pennsylvania, and John Sergeant Wise of Virginia made speeches. Society ladies sat in the adjoining room and ate, drank, chatted and listened.
In connection with the same celebration the learned societies of Philadelphia, including the University of Pennsylvania, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society, gave a dinner in the Academy of Music on the seventeenth of September, which was perhaps the most imposing function that ever occurred
