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Ebook has 1977 lines and 101369 words, and 40 pages

LOWELL'S PROPHECY.

Now, friends, there has been an element of comedy to me in being held up in Massachusetts as an anarchistic agitator, when all that I have been doing has been to try to reduce to practice in the present day what the greatest men of Massachusetts have preached in past time.

I have got here, and I am going to read to you, just a few lines from Lowell and then two lines from Emerson--Lowell's being written nearly 60 years ago and Emerson's 50 years ago. Lowell's run:

New times demand new measures and new men; The old advances and in time outgrows The laws that in our fathers' day were best. And doubtless after us some purer scheme will be Shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth. My soul is not a palace of the past, Where outworn creeds like Rome's great Senate quake, Hearing afar the vandals' trumpet hoarse That shakes old systems with a thunder fit. The time is ripe and rotten ripe for change. Then let it come; I have no dread Of what is called for by the instinct of mankind.

Friends, that is what Lowell wrote in 1856. It is what we could put on our banners now in 1912.

And I appeal to the Massachusetts of Lowell's time, to the Massachusetts that believed in the Bigelow papers, to the Massachusetts that sent young Lowell and Shaw, that sent Hallowell and so many of your people to the front in the Civil War.

I appeal to that Massachusetts to stand loyal now to the memories of Massachusetts' great past.

And now just wait--only two more lines of poetry. One of the curious traits of many of our good friends who are at the moment our opponents is that they are entirely willing to pay heed to the loftiest democratic sentiments if you will only keep them as sentiments and not try to reduce them to prose.

EMERSON AND THE PEOPLE.

I think I could get every worthy citizen of the Back Bay who at present feels the deepest distrust of us to applaud with tepid decorum the following two lines of Emerson, provided only that I merely read them, in the course of a lecture on Emerson, and did not ask to translate them into action. The lines are:

For fishers and choppers and plowmen Shall constitute a State.

He is describing the birth of Massachusetts, the birth of the United States, and he describes this country as being foreordained through the ages to show the kings, the aristocracy, the powers of privilege in the Old World, that here in the New World we could have a true and real democracy, a democracy where fishers and choppers and plowmen constitute a State.

As I say, friends, I could get decorous applause in any part of the Back Bay for that sentiment so long as I treated it purely as poetry of the past and not as politics of the present.

"THE MOB" WHO RULE.

But when I ask that the choppers, the plowmen, the fishers be given the absolute, the real control over their Government: when I ask that the farmers, the factory workers, the retail merchants, the young professional men, the railroad men, all the average citizens, be given the real control of this Government of theirs, be given the right to nominate their own candidates, be given the right to supervise the acts of all their servants--the minute I do that, I am told that I am appealing to the momentary passion of the mob , that fishers and choppers and plowmen are all right in poetry but when I try to put them into politics they become a mob cursed with an inability to act except under the impulse of momentary passion.

Now, friends, in my life, according to the strength that has been given me, I have always striven measurably to realize every ideal I have ever possessed, and I hold with deepest conviction that there is nothing worse in any man than to profess a high ideal as a mere matter of intellectual pleasure and in practice to make no effort to realize that ideal. I hold that it is discreditable to us as a people, discreditable to you of Massachusetts, if you praise Emerson's and Lowell's lines in the abstract and fail to do your best to endeavor actually to realize them in the present.

THE PEOPLE NO JUDGES.

All I am trying to do is to practically put into effect now in America, in 1912, the principles which your great leaders in Massachusetts, your great statesmen of the past, your great writers, your poets of the past, preached 30 and 50 and 70 years ago. That is all that I am trying to do.

And, friends, I now wish to put before you just what I mean by one of my proposals which has attracted the most criticism, and the people will catch up with it in the end.

In different parts of this Union, in different States, we have had very different qualities of public service. Nowhere have the differences been greater than in the judiciary.

MASSACHUSETTS JUDGES GOOD.

Here in Massachusetts you have had, I believe, a very unusually high quality of service from your judges.

When I was President, one of the revolutionary things that I did, of which you have heard so much, was, without any precedent--to put on the Supreme Court of the Nation two judges from Massachusetts.

It was revolution; it had never been done before, but I should not think that Massachusetts would attack me because of it. I put on those two men--one of them Mr. Moody, my Attorney General , because I had become convinced from my association with him that he not only knew law but knew life , and that he had a realization of the needs and of the ideals of the great majority of his fellow citizens, the men and women who go to make up the average of the citizenship of the United States.

I put on Mr. Holmes, then chief justice here , because studying his decisions I had grown to feel that he, too, sympathized with the American people, and, what was even more important, realized that the American people must decide for themselves, and not have anyone else decide for them, what their ideas of fundamental justice, as expressed in law, ought to be.

THE BAY STATE EXAMPLE.

And when I made my Columbus speech the State that I held up as an example to other States in the matter of the treatment of its judiciary was Massachusetts. Now, from reading the Massachusetts papers you would have thought that I was holding up the Massachusetts courts to obloquy.

I was holding them up for imitation elsewhere and I was advocating that in other States you should exercise the same type of supervision over your courts as Massachusetts has exercised.

But that was not all. I am dealing not with Massachusetts only; I am dealing with the 40 or 50 Commonwealths that go to make up this country as a whole.

THE TRAITOR JUDGES.

In some of these Commonwealths there have been put on the bench judges who have betrayed the interests of the people.

If you doubt my words, you study the history of the cases in California in which Frank Heney was engaged, you study the history of the cases in Missouri in which Folk and Hadley were engaged. In those two States, gentlemen, I would have gone to any necessary length to take off the bench the judges who had betrayed the interests of justice and of the plain people.

In certain other States, my own State of New York, the great State of Illinois, we were fronted with an entirely different situation. In those States, as far as I know, there was no trouble with the judges being corrupt.

In New York I know that the court of appeals is composed of upright, well-meaning men.

DO NOT KNOW VITAL NEEDS.

But the courts in those States have been composed of men who know nothing whatever of the vital needs of the great bulk of their fellow Americans, and who, unlike your courts in Massachusetts, have endeavored to impose their own outworn philosophy of life upon the millions of their fellow citizens.

Now, I want to give you certain examples, concrete cases of just what I mean, because I have always found that a concrete case explains my position better than a general statement.

Almost as soon as I left Harvard I went into the New York Legislature. And my education began. Now, I did not come to my present position as a result of study in the library, in the closet.

I came to my present position as the result of living in a world of men. It is because I have associated with them, I have worked with them, and I know my fellow Americans in many a different part of this Union and in all grades of life. I have worked with them.

TO THE MEN OF THE WEST.

Gentlemen, I am just going to give these one or two examples just to show you what I mean; that is all. For instance, I lived out West, in the cow country, quite a time, the short-grass country , and we would ship trainloads of cattle East. I and three or four other men who were going would go in the caboose at the end of the cattle train.

If the train stopped we would jump out with our poles, and we would run up along the length of the cars to poke up the cattle that had lain down, because if we let them lie down the others would trample them to death.

And usually about the time we got near the engine the train would start again. Then we would have to climb up on the first car and dance along back from car to car until we got to the last car and climb down to the caboose.

KNOWS THE BRAKEMAN.

Now, once or twice I had to perform that voyage in a late fall or early winter night with snow on the roofs of the cars and the wind blowing, and I was thoroughly contented when it was through.

And now, friends, when a workman's-compensation act comes up and the question arises whether a brakeman, a switchman, any man of the kind should be compensated for the loss of life or limb in taking charge of the trains in which you and I travel in comfort in the Pullman cars--when that comes up I think of my feelings when I jumped from car to car on the top of that cattle train, and when a miss or slip meant the loss of a leg or an arm or the loss of my life, and I know how the brakeman feels in such a case.

THE JUDGES DON'T KNOW.

Now in New York those worthy, well-meaning, elderly judges of the court of appeals have never had such an experience in their lives.

They don't know. They don't visualize to themselves how that brakeman feels. They are not able to present to their minds the risks incident to the ordinary, everyday performance of his duties.

They don't know the brakeman. They don't know what it is--I am speaking of a case I know--they don't know what it means when a brakeman loses both legs, and the following winter--I am speaking of a case I know, my own personal experience--the following winter his wife can't go out because she can't purchase shoes if she purchases shoes to send the children to school in. If they did visualize those facts to themselves, I know that they would entirely alter the course of their judicial decisions. They don't understand what the facts of the case are.

Now, this is simply as a preliminary, because I want you to know, to realize, that I have come to my present convictions as a result of having lived in the actual world of workaday men. I am not a sentimentalist.

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