Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1901 — Quay to Quit Pubilc Life. [ARTICLE]

Quay to Quit Pubilc Life.

The declaration made by Matthew Stanley Quay, Senator of the United States from Pennsylvania, in a speech at .the magnificent dinner given in his honor by the Republican clubs of that state at Philadelphia the other night, that he will never again be a candidate for or accept any official position, may be of passing interest to our readers. For Quay has been a national figure. As chairman of the Republican national committee in the campaign of 1888 his remarkable political generalship did much toward the election of Harrison, and the long line of acrimonious political combats which have centered about him in recent years in Pennsylvania, resulting finally last January in his re-election to the senate, has kept his name conspicuously before the country. His statement, therefore, that his political race is run is of more than ordinary significance. It means that with the expiration of his present term in the senate in 1904, if he lives, will come at last the end of the Cameron dynasty. Simon Cameron was elected to the United States senate from Pennsylvania in 1845. He served one term. He served again in the senate from 1867 to 1861. From 1867 to 1877, a period of ten years, he was again in the senate, when he transferred the man-

tle to his son, J. Donald Cameron, who served continuously for a period of twenty years—namely, from 1877 to 1897, when he retired from political life. The aggregate number of years served by the father and son is fortytwo —twenty-two years did the father pass in the senate, and twenty years did the son. In 1887, with the help of the junior Cameron, Quay was elected to the senate, and with the expiration of his present term will have served seventeen years, with the exception of one session in the senate in 1899 when the Pennsylvania senate failed to elect. So that since 1867 to the present time either a Cameron or Quay has been in the United States senate, and if Quay fills out his present term it will complete a term of service by these three gentlemen of thirtyseven successive years; or, including the total time of this triumvirate in the senate, a period of fifty-nine years. To one of his trusted lieutenants, after his withdrawal from official position, Matthew Stanley Quay will doubtless delegate the power of leadership, and thus as he nears the end, as the memories of his strenuous political conflicts become fainter and fainter and the inevitable impairments of age dim his vision, the influence of the Cameron dynasty, begun over half a century ago, and the long his own matchless leaderhsip will yet be a power in the ranks of the Republican party of Pennsylvania, and

the magnetism of that silent figure ■will be felt even in the years after he has passed away.