The World's Well-Being
CHIEF JUSTICE TAFT recently and quite correctly reminded his fellow-citizens that the work of the Supreme Court is to interpret the nation's law, and not to establish or promote justice. Acting...
...Pipkin through his study of the advance from the Health and Morals Act of 1802, which was little more than a legalized expression of humanitarian feeling, to the Factory and Workshop Act of 1901, the specific statutes of which dealt summarily with a host of industrial evils, will hardly care to debate the conclusion that there has existed in England "an immediate connection between public opinion and legislation...
...For it does involve, when well understood, "a freedom that recognizes the rights of the individual, the new power of community life, the rights of groups within the state, and the right of the state to express the common purpose for the good of all...
...If the Supreme Court of the United States accepts law as the practical equivalent of justice...
...Even now a number of social problems are known to exist upon which the law of the land has an important bearing, but toward a democratic solution of which that law can contribute nothing...
...In France there has not existed this same correlation between political institutions and social demands...
...From the Revolution had come an inheritance which was forever setting political action and industrial reform at loggerheads...
...Many things which have profoundly modified industry tumbled into the world of commerce through accident or invention as suddenly as a meteor might fall into a harvest field, and occasioned about the same amount of dust and turmoil...
...Obviously there are several varieties of cloudy vision—that of the man who has been stunned by the debris, and that of the man who instinctively though selfishly keeps...
...Yet as things are now, practically no effort is made to take away from conservatism its dictatorship over the Constitution...
...Charles W. Pipkin's The Idea of Social Justice, which is briefly noticed elsewhere in this issue...
...It deals with a static code of civic righteousness and must be content with doing so, even though it may realize fully as well as anybody else that existing conditions are in numerous ways wrong, chaotic and in need of adjustment...
...and even issues fundamentally economic in character, such as slavery and immigration, have been settled in the spirit of idealistic politics...
...Indeed some of them did not care to look around when they could, and thus added their own blindness to the general confusion...
...This situation is due in part, of course, to the fact that organized American labor has an economic power and wealth far beyond what its equals in European countries can dream of...
...Indeed the writer has little difficulty showing that the movement toward social amelioration in England went hand in hand with a more and more marked tendency toward popular political rule...
...Here, too, "the ideal of social justice" has frankly been identified with the purpose of political good government...
...One may concede that in a country where pioneer conditions still prevail to a considerable extent, the freedom of industry is a stimulus to initiative and development...
...The book, one may say without too desperately seeking refuge in metaphor, is an attempt to make a chart of social progress in England and France since the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the spirit of an optimistic but scientific physician...
...Obviously all this would not be affected by the kind of public opinion which has been operative in France and England, because that opinion has not been organized to any appreciable extent...
...But, we may properly ask, how is improvement to come about...
...Where disputes between capital and labor arise, "hands off" becomes the watchword of state authority...
...A democracy which remained loyal to this ideal would almost necessarily strive to mitigate the "tragic destiny" of man by righting economic wrong and by guaranteeing equitable opportunity to the largest possible number...
...Acting on the assumption that the accumulated constitutional legislation of the United States is the existing public definition of justice, the Court merely declares that such and such an act bears such and such a relation to the definition...
...One says "might" because...
...Nevertheless Mr...
...Still it may be argued with some plausibility that humanity as a whole does love reasonable order—does want to have things in their right places, even where gain and power are concerned...
...But at present, committed as we are to democracy, nothing seems more strange than our indifference to the good ends which this can serve and has served, where it has been consciously and sensibly active...
...Fascism and Bolshevism, have developed—France successfully counseled the intervention of the state in the conduct of industry...
...if that law, in turn, is the official expression of the popular will— then it follows that a failure to see in legislative action an important means for arriving at the establishment of social justice may be a calamitous mistake...
...This trend of argument is available to all who care to read such a survey of recent political and economic effort as Mr...
...This has value in a study of social justice, for it shows a faith in the working machinery of democracy...
...It may be, as some aver, that democracy is not a safe guide...
...It is salutary to view these matters against a background of history now and then, rather than to think of them always in purely theoretical terms...
...busy trying to ward off danger from his own person— or trying to annex what available plunder he can...
...The average working-man became so definitely committed to the idea that justice could be achieved most quickly through the intervention of the state that wild dreams of millennia, or futile recourse to determinism, hardly entered at all into the philosophy of British labor...
...How shall our definition be corrected, if that be necessary...
...Those who follow Mr...
...Pipkin is able to show—though by no means altogether clearly—that the French opinion which more or less aptly labeled itself "socialism" gradually managed to dedicate the powers of the state to carrying out a' program of improvement...
...Recognized lead ers," says the introduction, "supported by an increasing number of the electorate, depended upon public opinion playing an important part in bringing about desired changes in the life of the nation...
...It has felt competent to fight its own battles, to establish its own standards of justice...
...People did not immediately see the connection between these things and universal principle...
...After all one cannot note too clearly that politics and economics are primarily two sets of facts gathered in the process of social living, and therefore in need of constant correlation with dependable general principles of morals or natural law...
...Even today, when the social problem in its widest sense is influenced by abnormal factors like post-war rehabilitation and financial depression, the government of England is able to discuss grave changes in its attitude toward industrial relations without destroying confidence and without pushing opposing tendencies of thought to extremes...
...What might be revealed were industrial circumstances less fortunate than they are, must be left to speculation...
...The legitimate desire to emancipate working men and women from intolerable conditions was likewise distorted by a variety of philosophic doctrines guaranteed to do almost anything except restore order to society...
...Excepting for sporadic groups of intellectuals and for certain minor organizations that may be called political by stretching the term, nobody in this country seems interested even in paving the way for the kind of work which proved so valuable to the continental nations...
...Nevertheless it involves great dangers and allows equally great opportunities to lie idle...
...From what source is justice to spring...
...If we say, therefore, that the increasing accuracy of the European legal definition of justice has been attained through the exercise of democratic public opinion, we are at the same time answering the questions put at the beginning of these remarks...
...Despite the intellectual and electoral victories of syndicalism—out of which the twin repudiations of democracy...
...The effectiveness of justice in the industrial life of the United States might be achieved through deliberate use of government to outlaw injustice...
...For its part, conservative American government uniformly feels—except during rare moments —that its one great contribution to the regulation of industry is the tariff...
...for better or worse, our present tendency is not in that direction...
...On the other hand, trade unionism in the United States has zealously striven against making its affairs part of the general public enterprise...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 7
