In different parts of this Union, in different States, we have had very different qualities of public service. Nowhere have the differences been greater than in the judiciary.
MASSACHUSETTS JUDGES GOOD.
Here in Massachusetts you have had, I believe, a very unusually high quality of service from your judges. [Applause.]
When I was President, one of the revolutionary things that I did, of which you have heard so much, was, without any precedent—to put on the Supreme Court of the Nation two judges from Massachusetts. [Applause.]
It was revolution; it had never been done before, but I should not think that Massachusetts would attack me because of it. [Laughter and applause.] I put on those two men—one of them Mr. Moody, my Attorney General [applause], because I had become convinced from my association with him that he not only knew law but knew life [applause], and that he had a realization of the needs and of the ideals of the great majority of his fellow citizens, the men and women who go to make up the average of the citizenship of the United States.
I put on Mr. Holmes, then chief justice here [applause], because studying his decisions I had grown to feel that he, too, sympathized with the American people, and, what was even more important, realized that the American people must decide for themselves, and not have anyone else decide for them, what their ideas of fundamental justice, as expressed in law, ought to be. [Applause.]
THE BAY STATE EXAMPLE.
And when I made my Columbus speech the State that I held up as an example to other States in the matter of the treatment of its judiciary was Massachusetts. [Applause.] Now, from reading the Massachusetts papers you would have thought that I was holding up the Massachusetts courts to obloquy.
I was holding them up for imitation elsewhere and I was advocating that in other States you should exercise the same type of supervision over your courts as Massachusetts has exercised.