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The Green Bag
worthy of us; but, speaking broadly, we deal with these men as though we wished the best men for our service, and, again
speaking broadly, we obtain for our ser vice the best men to be obtained for our outlay; indeed it were safe to say far better men than the like salaries com mand elsewhere. Our judges are far more capable than are our legislators to give expression and effect to the people's will; they are also more competent and more faithful interpreters of what is the people's will, because far less liable to be misled as to this by mere outcry from the press or the tawdry gabble of agitators; for, ever since the days of the Three Tailors of Tooley street, the query: "What
is" or “Who are ‘the people'?" has been matter of debate and often of dispute; and, although it has received, for prac
tical purposes, many difi‘erent answers
ology. Other classes are its vital auto mata, working, as do the heart and lungs, at their several tread mills, with no
thought beyond their daily tasks and daily needs, yet on whose continued labor depends its continued life. The
hunger for gain of still others among its members makes them, like the stomach, in seeming blindly selfish and greedy,
but, under proper control, none the less indispensable to its health; like a man, a community languishes when it loses its appetite. Finally,’ it has the equiva
lent of a brain, the seat of its political consciousness and the source of its polit ical will, an organ which, in politics,
thinks and decides for its whole mass. Now, the brain is always a very small portion of the organism; even in man it is only two or three per cent, although
its proportionate size grows steadily as we ascend the scale of physical being. If
in different countries and at different
one man may say truthfully, or with any
times, the legal “people," that is to say that part of the community empowered by law to speak and act for the whole,
approach to truth, “L’Etatc'est Moi," the state of which he speaks has, politically, but the rudimentary brain of a fish or a
has been always and everywhere a
reptile.
minority of all the human beings subject to the "people's” will. Moreover, if we look critically and philosophically into the genesis of any notable piece of legislation, we shall become convinced
brain of the American people is vastly more developed; but it is none the less a specialized organ and to recognize, in terpret and intelligently obey its dic tates we need the services of true
that only an extremely small fraction of
experts; we find these in our judges.
even the legal people has had any appre ciable or recognizable agency in its pro
vanced of late years to the effect, in
duction and that what we have described as “the will of the people," is in reality the will of but a few among the indi
Unquestionably the political
A very singular doctrine has been ad substance, that our judges are exempt
viduals composing the people.
from public criticism, at all events with respect to their judicial acts and utter ances. If the newspapers may be trusted,
In truth, in the human body politic, as in the human body physical, develop
a member of the Legislature of a great state recently spoke of a resolution of
ment of will power is a specialized func
censure on a judge as “anarchistic."
tion. The former has always its hewers of wood and drawers of water, to do as they are bid like the hands and feet, the arms and legs; locomotor ataxia is no less a malady in politics than in physi
There can be little doubt that the germ
of this curious notion is found in the facts that any effort ab extra to influence
the action of a judge or a jury in a pending cause has been always held a
