Judges as Law Makers
513
it easier to induce the man in question to run when he knows that his running
urchins called newspapers will hoot and make faces at you and draw on the
can amount only to a protest against
walls nonsensical pictures intended to wound your feelings and make you
abuses and scandals or a help to other candidates than when there seems to be some fair show for his own election. We may ask why do really first-class men, as a rule, shun public employment in its higher grades and too often oblige their state or nation to be content with second-class, if, indeed, even these can be secured and our public trusts are not abandoned to the clearly unfit?
The
ridiculous, and I shall tolerate and even applaud their antics. Finally, if you shall stay with me far longer than do most of my workmen and, by reason of this long and faithful service, can no longer work hard or find work readily, when I have done with you I will show
you the door with no mark of gratitude for the past and no provision against
answer is sufi‘iciently obvious. Those men best fitted for such work will not do
want for the future." Is it likely that a
it, or doit long, because the conditions of
whose acts squared
their work do not .allow them to work happily and with self-respect. The American people, as a would-be employer of labor, approaches a skilled
would get such a workman? And, if it isn't, why should one of our states or
workman of this class, a man assured at
private employer who talked thus and with his words
the nation hope to do better?
There are two classes of our public servants who are treated, in the main,
all times of steady work at good wages, and says to him, speaking by its acts: "Come and work for me; if you come I shall probably take away your job at just about the time you have learned to take interest in it and to do it to your own satisfaction. Meantime I shall let
as all servants must be treated by a
others of my workmen, whose help is indispensable to your work, constantly
sult of this treatment, with lamentable but comparatively rare exceptions, we do find him a man of honor. We safe guard our soldiers and sailors against an old age of misery, and men of the
hinder it and embarrass you by all sorts of gratuitous annoyances, not necessarily because they have any quarrel with you
but often as incidents to squabbles among themselves or to attain ends of their own with which you have no con_ cern. I shall also permit, indeed I shall encourage, some of your fellow-workmen
master who would be well served. I mean our judges and the ofi‘icers of our Army and Navy. We behave to a judge, we behave to a military or a naval officer
as if we expected to find him a man of honor, and, in no small measure as a re
highest character and capacity willingly
relinquish the hope of wealth and the independence of civil life to thus serve us. Although, as yet, a like provision for our judges is scandalously far from
and outsiders as well, to frequently and publicly censure you and your work,
universal, and although their salaries
and often to do this not only harshly
find men worthy of the bench to give up for it all the great possibilities of our
and uncharitably, but ignorantly and in bad faith, without knowing what you
have really done and without wishing or trying to know this. Often, more over, while you are at your work-bench,
a crowd of silly and badly behaved
amount hardly to a living wage, we yet
bar. Our courts and our Army and Navy are indeed far from perfect;
neither is our treatment of those who preside in the former or who command the latter in all respects just to them or