This confidence in and respect for the judiciary as a whole has increased with the general advance of the country in population and wealth. There have been larger questions with which to deal, and the courts have been found adequate to the task. But at the same time the personal consequence and reputation of every individual American judge has been steadily decreasing. As States multiply and the range of litigation widens, the work of judicial exposition of legal principles comes to be shared by so many hands that what any one man does is of comparatively small account. There is no room for star players upon the stage. Broad as it is, it is too crowded for one to make a conspicuous place for himself and stand as Marshall or Story, Kent or Parsons, did, apart from his fellows. Popular confidence is now not placed in courts because this or that man is the ruling spirit in them. It is impersonal and attaches itself to the institution of the judiciary as, all things considered, the best guaranty of good government in the United States.
This spirit of confidence is, of course, not universal and unqualified. It is often not found in bodies of working men, associated as Labor Unions. They have repeatedly found a court enforcing public order in a way that interfered with their manner of conducting a strike. They have been met by injunctions, and more often by criminal prosecutions. The membership of a Labor Union, in many parts of the country, is apt to be largely of foreign birth. The leaders not infrequently know little of the English language and less of American institutions. They have been led, in their native land, to regard the law and its officers as their enemies, and they look at them in the same way here. It is believed, however, that a large majority of the Unions regard them with respect, and it is certain that such is the prevailing feeling of non-union men.
But that the public trust in our judges is less than it was when the first edition of this work was published,[Footnote: See supra, page 340.] is indicated by the favor with which, in many quarters, the doctrine of the "judicial recall" has been received. The dangers incident to its practice are obvious, and seem far to outweigh any attending advantages.
In the United States, of all lands on the face of the earth, it is important that the judges should act with resolution and without thought of the consequences personal to themselves. Elsewhere in form, but here only in fact, are judges armed with the power of declaring legislative action void which is in conflict with a higher form of law, that proceeded directly from the people, and mainly from the people of a former generation. To expose one who exercises this power to immediate displacement, by a popular vote—largely, perhaps, composed of his political opponents—is to invite the enactment of questionable statutes, and still worse—to weaken the attractions of the bench for able and honest men. Our judicial terms, in most of the States, are already too brief for the public good. To make them determinable at the will of the electoral constituency tends powerfully to keep good lawyers at the bar, who might otherwise have done honor to a judicial station.
End of Project Gutenberg's The American Judiciary, by Simeon E. Baldwin