intimacy with the Administration circle, having long had friendly relations
with the President. In all my life I have never passed so delightful and
useless a winter.

Very early in the action I found that my mission involved a serious and
vexed question--nothing less than the creation of a new property--and I
proceeded warily. Through my uncle, Stanley Matthews, I interested the
members of the Supreme Court. The Attorney General, a great lawyer and
an old Philadelphia friend, was at my call and elbow. The Joint Library
Committee of Congress, to which the measure must go, was with me. Yet
somehow the scheme lagged.

I could not account for this. One evening at a dinner Mr. Blaine
enlightened me. We sat together at table and suddenly he turned and said:
"How are you getting on with your bill?" And my reply being rather halting,
he continued, "You won't get a vote in either House," and he proceeded
very humorously to improvise the average member's argument against it as
a dangerous power, a perquisite to the great newspapers and an imposition
upon the little ones. To my mind this was something more than the
post-prandial levity it was meant to be.

Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need no
act of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two, and I
think four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me show them
to you." He did so and I went no further with the business, quite agreeing
with Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of it. To a recent date the
Associated Press has relied on these decisions under the common law of
England. Curiously enough, quite a number of newspapers in whose actual
service I was engaged, opened fire upon me and roundly abused me.