Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 13.pdf/245

 214

mine as finite; and I should feel a greater doubt whether, after Hamilton and the Con stitution itself, Marshall's work proved more than a strong intellect, a good style, personal ascendancy in his court, courage, justice and the convictions of his party. My keenest interest is excited not by. what are called great questions and great cases, but by little decisions which the common run of selectors would pass by because they do not deal with the Constitution or a telephone company, yet which have in them the germ of some wider theory and therefore of some profound interstitial change in the very tissue of the law. The men whom I should be tempted to commemorate would be the originators of transforming thought. They often are half obscure because what the world pays for is judgment, not the original mind. But what I have said does not mean that I shall join in this celebration or in granting the motion before the Court in any half hearted way. Not only do I recur to what I said in the beginning, and remembering that you cannot separate a man from his place, remember also that there fell to Mar shall perhaps the greatest place that ever was filled by a Judge, but when I consider his might, his justice and his wisdom, I do fully believe that if American law were to be represented by a single figure, sceptic and worshipper alike would agree without dis pute that the figure could be but one alone, and that one John Marshall. A few words more and I have done. We live by symbols, and what shall be symbol ized by any image of the sight depends upon the mind of him who sees it. The setting aside of this day in honor of a great Judge may stand to a Virginian for the glory of his glorious State; to a 'patriot for the fact that time has been on Marshall's side, and that the theory for which Hamilton argued, and he decided, and Webster spoke, and Grant fought and Lincoln died, is now our corner stone. To the more abstract, but farther reaching contemplation of the lawyer, it stands for the rise of a new body of jurispru

dence by which guiding principles are raised above the reach of statute and State, and Judges are entrusted with a solemn and hitherto unheard of authority and duty. To one who lives in what may seem to him a solitude of thought, this day — as it marks the triumph of a man whom some Presidents of his time bade carry out his judgments as he could —this day marks the fact that all thought is social — is on its way to action — that, to borrow the expression of a French writer, every idea tends to become first a catechism and then a code, and that accord ing to its worth his unhelped meditation may one day mount a throne, and without armies, or even with them, may shoot across the world the electric despotism of an unresisted power. It is all a symbol, if you like, but so is the flag. The flag is but a bit of bunting to one who insists on prose. Yet, thanks to Marshall and to the men of his generation — and for this above all we celebrate him and them — its red is our life-blood, its stars our world, its blue our heaven. It owns our land. At will it throws away our lives.1 • THE BAR.

It is not too much to say that he (Marshall) found his country drifting rudderless without chart or compass, and he left it with its course as definite and certain as that of the fixed stars in their courses and invested with all the sovereign powers necessary to a great nation. In these historic and enduring labors let us never forget that the Court consisting of himself and his able, learned and patriotic associates enjoyed the assistance of a Bar of unusual eloquence and ability. As we re call them our minds are filled with admira tion of their great intellectual powers and of their absolute fidelity to the Court, which it was at once their privilege and their duty to advise and to instruct. In those arduous labors of evolving, year by year, the true 1 Honorable Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.