Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/102

 whatever laws and constitutions may say to the contrary, and when its blood is up it can get anything it wants.

Most of the so-called constitutional checks, in fact, have yielded, at one time or other, to its pressure. No one familiar with the history of the Supreme Court, for example, need be told that its vast and singular power to curb legislation has always been exercised with one eye on the election returns. Practically all of its most celebrated decisions, from that in the Dred Scott case to that in the Northern Securities case, have reflected popular rages of the hour, and many of them have been modified, or even completely reversed afterward, as the second thought of the plain people has differed from their first thought. This responsiveness to the shifts of popular opinion and passion is not alone due to the fact that the personnel of the court, owing to the high incidence of senile deterioration among its members, is constantly changing, and that the President and the Senators, in filling vacancies, are bound as practical politicians to consider the doctrines that happen to be fashionable in the cross-roads grocery-stores and barber-shops. It is also due, and in no small