Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 08.pdf/418

 The Courts at Bar. changing the Constitution is a tedious and difficult process, and the people of this country seem yearly to more and more respect the old maxim, stare super antiquas vias. And that maxim will doubtless play a potent part when the planks touching court and judges come under discussion. But to recur a moment in conclusion at these glances at judicial history, there was much — and with some reading between the lines — in the dissenting opinions on the income tax to encourage one class of politi cians to exalt the rights of masses against classes. For instance, dissenting Justice Harlan observed : — "The practical effect of the decision to day is to give to certain kinds of property a position of favoritism and advantage incon sistent with the fundamental principles of our social organization, and to invest them with power and influence that may be peril ous to that portion of the American people upon whom rests the larger part of the bur dens of the Government, and who ought not to be subjected to the dominion of aggre gated wealth any more than the property of the country should be at the mercy of the lawless." And dissenting Justice Brown added in yet more strong terms — that might be almost

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termed Populistic as we know the word, not in a partisan, but a purely etymological sense : — "As it implies a declaration that every income tax must be laid according to the rule of apportionment, the decision involves nothing less than a surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class. ... I hope it may not prove the first step toward the sub mergence of the liberties of the people in a sordid despotism of wealth. As I cannot escape the conviction that the decision of the Court in this great case is fraught with immeasurable danger to the future of the country, and that it approaches the propor tions of a national calamity, I feel it my duty to enter my protest against it." If the decision " approached the propor tion of a national calamity" there would seem to be at least a small excuse for a party to pass resolutions touching the " na tional calamity." And either Justice Har lan or Brown, in conning the clause first quoted in this article, may in their eminent classic recollections recall this verse of the poet Waller of the seventeenth century : — "That eagle's fate and mine are one Which on the shaft that made him die Espied a feather of his own Wherewith at times he soared so high."