THE JUDGE AS A POLITICAL FACTOR views of the members of our legislature but by the social and political views of the judges who sit upon the wool-sack. These facts the warring forces in the industrial struggle of to-day have come to recognize and the result has been a new movement in the political world. There is now to be noticed a determination by one party to place and keep the judiciary elective, in politics, and immediately responsive; by the other, as national appointive and if possi ble possessed of a life tenure. "Let the jury and the people decide" is the motto of one party; "the court must decide " is the motto of the other. The line has been drawn, the gage of battle has been thrown, and among the most significant of all the modern industrial movements, and there have been many which have been signifi cant, is the open entrance of organized labor into the political field and its reliance upon the suggestion made by Mr. Herbert Spencer over half a century ago that the great political battles of the future will be industrial battles and that the granting of the right to the ballot to the laboring classes has given to that majority the ultimate victory. The challenge on behalf of those who favor a life term for the judiciary of the states as well as of the nation was issued in 1893 by no less a person than Mr. Justice Brewer in an address before the New York State Bar Association. The response was the be ginning by Mr. William Jennings Bryan of his agitation for an elective federal judiciary and the entrance of the labor unions of the country generally and of Chicago in particular into the political arena for the avowed purpose of removing from the bench those judges whom they branded as "Unfair" and whose decisions and actions appear inimical to their interests. On the side which is opposed to a life term judiciary is to be found not merely organized labor, but the more radical wing of the Democratic party and perhaps that of the Republican. On the other are to be found the vested interests, the
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conservatives of both the Republican and Democratic organizations, the ordinary business man, and, above all, that edu cated and respectable body of citizens, the college or professorial class, which Jack Lon don characterizes as "noble, but not alive." The interests of organized labor in the personnel of the courts and its appreciation of the political importance of the judiciary is modern in its origin and is the result of a logical growth. The doctrine that in a democracy such as ours every wrong can be righted at the polls and that where this remedy exists there is no excuse for anarchy and no justification for a resort to violence, has for a long time been taught in America and for a long time has served as a check to violence and insurrection. Like many others of its kind, however, it at first meant nothing, in so far as what is known as the labor movement was concerned, and could be safely urged even by those who were most inimical to the interest of the American working man. Until quite recently, indeed, the great conservative farmer class has everywhere controlled our elections. This body of small employers of labor has, except perhaps in the sole case of railroad ownership and control, been a body of con firmed individualists. The immediate in terests of its members have lain in small wages and in long hours of toil. Its habit has always been to exaggerate the pur chasing value of the wages paid in cities. It has known nothing of the injurious effects of the routine and mechanical toil inci dental to the factory employments and to labor in the mines. It has, therefore, never looked with favor on the demands of the city laboring man nor of the wageearner generally, and has been bitterly opposed to all labor unions and combina tions, whether of capital or of labor. Since the growth of our large cities, however, and the organization of the armies of the work ing men who are now centered in the mining districts and who work upon the railroads, a change has come. Although the fanner is still in the majority, he no
