Now in New York those worthy, well-meaning, elderly judges of the court of appeals have never had such an experience in their lives.
They don’t know. They don’t visualize to themselves how that brakeman feels. They are not able to present to their minds the risks incident to the ordinary, everyday performance of his duties.
They don’t know the brakeman. They don’t know what it is—I am speaking of a case I know—they don’t know what it means when a brakeman loses both legs, and the following winter—I am speaking of a case I know, my own personal experience—the following winter his wife can’t go out because she can’t purchase shoes if she purchases shoes to send the children to school in. If they did visualize those facts to themselves, I know that they would entirely alter the course of their judicial decisions. They don’t understand what the facts of the case are.
Now, this is simply as a preliminary, because I want you to know, to realize, that I have come to my present convictions as a result of having lived in the actual world of workaday men. I am not a sentimentalist. [Great applause.]
BELIEVES IN JUSTICE.
I am not a sentimentalist. If there is one quality I dislike as much as hardness of heart it is softness of head.
But I do believe in justice just as you believe in justice, and I am trying to get justice, and I am trying to get it for those who are less fortunate just as for those who are more fortunate. [Applause.]
Just wait. I want to give you just four or five cases of laws which the courts of Illinois and New York have declared unconstitutional. When I went into the legislature 30 years ago in New York, I was put on a committee to investigate the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses.
LIFE IN DESPAIR.
I remember well of one of them coming upon a room about 14 feet—16 feet, perhaps—square, in which two families lived, one of them with a boarder. Those two families, men, women, and children, worked and lived, day in and day out, night in and night out, there, at the manufacture of tobacco into cigars.