Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 25.pdf/231

 The Supreme

Court and its Slanderers

By James B. McDonough of the Arkansas Bar

OUR Constitution is not without honor save in its own country. Speaking of it, the great English com moner, William E. Gladstone, said: "The American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." The great scholar and diplomat, James Bryce, the retiring British Ambassador to the United States, recently said of it: "Yet after all deductions, it ranks above every other written Constitu tion for the intrinsic excellence of its scheme, its adaptation to the circum stances of the people, the simplicity, brevity, and precision of its language, its judicious mixture of definiteness in principle, with elasticity in details. The American Constitution is no exception to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown, so much the more enduring it is likely to prove. There is little in the Con stitution that is absolutely new." With few exceptions for a hundred and twenty-two years, the wisest and best men, the greatest constructive statesmen and publicists, the soundest reasoners and thinkers, including all true friends of human liberty of all countries, including our own, have given it first rank as a scheme of human government; and during a hundred and twenty-one years of that time and up to the good year of 1911, it was praised, loved, yes, venerated and worshiped by the whole American people as a

guarantor of human rights and of the highest and best freedom. Our American people, under its happy arrangement and fortunate division of powers, its wisdom, its strength and justice, in pre serving and protecting all rights,human as well as of property, have become a great and mighty nation far beyond the wildest and fondest dreams of any of our forefathers, the framers and founders. True, in this period it has had its trials, including the terrible tragedy of a civil war, but in all it has been vindi cated as the best scheme of human government ever devised. But in the good year of our Lord 1911, and today, it has been suddenly discov ered by a school of agitators and radicals, who, according to their own evidence concerning themselves, are the great est, best and wisest mortals of all time, that there is something radically and deeply wrong with the Constitution, and especially the judiciary; and as a consequence the Constitution through this assault on the judiciary is being murdered in the house of its friends and former worshipers. These selfstyled reformers, pretending to think and reason for the benefit of the people, endeavoring as they are to destroy a government of law, and to substitute in its place the absolutism of a single individual or the absolute rule of the legislature, claim, without the slight est support in truth, to have discovered, and they accordingly assert, that the judges are the arch-enemies of the hu man race, that they are the uncontroll able masters and rulers of the people and