"It has been said that there never was a very powerful character, a truly masculine, commanding man, who was not made so by struggles with great difficulties. Daily observation and history prove the truth of this statement. Hence I believe that the rough-and-tumble existence to which the majority of ambitious young men of our country are subjected, does much to prepare them for the higher duties of substantial, valuable citizenship. The active life and early struggles of Justice Harlan in his State have had their influence in making him the fearless jurist that he is.
"Shortly after his appointment, Justice Harlan was assigned as the Supreme Justice for this circuit, and served here for eighteen years. Many of you present remember his visit to Springfield and his holding court in this room.
"To be a member of the Federal Judiciary is the highest honor that can be conferred upon an American lawyer. The crowning glory of our Nation was the establishment, by the fathers, of the independent Federal Judiciary, which is the conservator of the Constitution. I have unbounded faith in it. It is the protector of those fundamental liberties so dear to the Anglo-Saxon race. State Legislatures and the Congress may be swayed by the heat and passion of the hour; but so long as our independent Federal Judiciary remains, our people are safe in their legal, fundamental, Constitutional rights.
"Perhaps there is nothing that illustrates so well Justice Harlan's character, the equality of all men before the law, as do some of his dissenting opinions."
I then referred to his famous dissent in the Civil Rights case, delivered in 1883; to his dissent in the Income Tax case, and others of his notable utterances from the Supreme Bench; and at the same time I referred to the fact that he had written more than seven hundred opinions, covering nearly every branch of the law, the opinions on Constitutional questions being unusually large. I added:
"In many respects Justice Harlan resembles his namesake, John Marshall. Like John Marshall, he received his early training for the bench in the active practice at the Bar. Like John Marshall, he enlisted and fought for his country. Like John Marshall, while still a young man, he was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court, and has for more than a quarter of a century occupied that position. And like John Marshall, his great work on the bench has been in cases involving the construction and application of the Constitution. He has been especially assigned by the Court to the writing of opinions on Constitutional Law. In my opinion he stands to-day as the greatest living Constitutional lawyer.
"If the Court please, I desire to refer to one more phase of Justice Harlan's character. He is a religious man. He does not parade his belief before the world, yet he possesses deep and devout convictions and has given deep study to church questions. And it may be said that the great men of the world from the earliest dawn of civilization, with but few exceptions, have believed that the life of the soul does not end with the death of the body. Cicero, long before the birth of the Saviour, said:
'When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what has passed, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future; when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries thence arising, I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself can not be mortal.'
"Centuries later the famous Dr. Johnson well said: 'How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die; that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on for ever.'
"Justice Harlan is a firm and devout believer in the immortality of the soul.