ANARCHY OR JUSTICE.
Friends, it is idle to tell me that I have not the right to protest that the United States Supreme Court was right and the court of appeals wrong [applause]; and if I am an anarchist, I am an anarchist in company with the Supreme Court of the United States. [Applause and cheers.]
All I ask is that, in that kind of a case, the ten millions of people of New York State shall not be balked of justice, but, after ample time for due deliberation on their part, shall be permitted to vote in this case whether the Supreme Court of the United States and the State courts of a dozen other States, like Iowa and Washington, are right, or whether the amiable elderly gentlemen of the New York Court of Appeals are right.
I ask whether it be true that justice can not be given to the man crippled in industry in New York, although it can be given to him in the Nation, and in Iowa and in Washington, and in every civilized country abroad; whether it be true that the man can not have justice done him in New York, or whether we shall say to the judges of the Court of Appeals of New York, “No; we stand by the doctrines laid down by the Supreme Court of the Nation,” and given utterance to by the Massachusetts judge, Mr. Justice Holmes, in the Oklahoma bank case. “We say that the people have the right, in the exercise of the police power of the general-welfare clause of the Constitution”—I am using Mr. Holmes’s words, not mine—“that the people have the right to decide such cases in accordance with the common standard of morality, with the preponderance opinion of the citizenship of the community, and that the courts have to respect such opinion as the popular opinion as to what morality demands.” [Applause.]
I hold that if it be true—if it be true—that in this country fishers and plowmen and choppers are to constitute a State, it must be true that they shall be permitted to impose their ideas of common justice, of common decency, upon their public servants, and that the public servants are in very fact the servants and not the masters of the community. [Applause.]