The Court of Appeals of the State of New York decided that the Supreme Court of the United States was wrong [laughter] and that the law was not constitutional.
Now, I want you to listen to this sentence, because I haven’t seen this fact brought out by any man yet.
“UNCONSTITUTIONALITY.”
At this moment in the State of New York if a New York brakeman is injured on a train going straight through across New York, from Boston to Chicago, he has a right to recover, it is constitutional for him to recover [laughter] for the injury.
But if his brother is working on a trolley in the same city in which he is injured on the railroad train, or if he is working on a railway train that only goes from Albany to Buffalo, then it becomes unconstitutional for him to recover. [Laughter and applause.]
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.]