EDITORIALS
Taft's Blow at the Consumer THE EXTRA SESSION is ended. Senators and Congressmen have left the capitol. All is quiet and deserted where but a week ago was the hum of roll calls and debate. And as...
...France would not tolerate such a court...
...Just as easy as it was for the present Supreme Court to read into the Anti-Trust law the word "unreasonable" which Congress repeatedly refused to write into it...
...Not by the Aldrich method of deceptive juggling and increasing of duties...
...IF OFFICIALS would give more attention to the payment of living wages to their employees...
...and are demanding now...
...A FIFTEEN-YEAR OLD BOY is to be hanged by the neck until dead...
...Read them...
...Can such a condition long continue in a country whose people are thoroughly determined to remove every barrier to self-government...
...Incidentally, by doing so he repudiated his previous utterances...
...To meet the ends of justice...
...Germany would not tolerate such a court...
...They are sober, constructive suggestions...
...Benson goes on to say: "Indeed, the United States Supreme Court is the greatest court in the world in the sense that it exercises powers that are not even claimed by the highest tribunal of any other land...
...But what are you to say when your representatives, at last made responsive to your will, pass a bill taking off from your shoulders the great burdens of the Woolen Trust duties (those duties, you remember, that President Taft admitted were "indefensible") and THEN ARE FOILED IN THEIR EFFORT TO DO something FOR YOU BY THE VETO OF THE PRESIDENT...
...Even Spain would not tolerate such a court...
...As the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, he created the greatest court that the world ever saw...
...Chief Justice Marshall wrote the decision...
...Just how it happened is not of present importance...
...Lest there be some to whom Mr...
...And as the dust begins once more to settle upon the desks of your representatives do you not begin to feel a sense of loss—to feel that the one really important legislative achievement of Congress in your interest at this session was wrested from you...
...The hanging is set for September 8. The World's Most Powerful Court ALLAN L. BENSON, in the second of his articles on "The Usurped Power of the Courts," now running in Pearson's magazine, tells how in 1803 the Supreme Court first took unto itself the power to declare a law unconstitutional...
...Holland's...
...That is the kind of tariff revision you have been so insistently demanding...
...Benson : "Marshall had a giant's power and used it like a giant...
...Roe will discuss remedies for the conditions that have aroused popular distrust of the courts...
...Says Mr...
...But sincere, substantial, honest reduction of those tariff schedules that enable the great trusts dealing in the necessities of life to exact enormous tribute from all of you...
...Yet with this child the sentence is murder, the punishment is death—horrible, writhing, shuddering death...
...England would not tolerate such a court...
...Bettor wire...
...Measured by its power, can there be any doubt that our greatest court is superlatively great...
...He killed another boy in a street fight...
...If you think the ends of justice and the majesty of the law claim no such inhuman visitation upon "one of the least of these," will you not write to Governor Donaghey at Little Rock, Arkansas, and ask executive clemency on the ground of the extreme youth of the offender...
...No court may change a letter of them...
...We think not...
...Benson's statement may seem unduly sweeping, we print the following from the recent message of President Taft, vetoing the Arizona-New Mexico statehood bill: "It (the power to decide what is and what is not the law) gives to our judiciary a position higher, stronger, and more responsible than that of the judiciary of any other country...
...Think of the grown-up men, strong of body and mature of judgment, on whom the Law has visited only the sentence of man-slaughter, the punishment of imprisonment, and been satisfied...
...The court with the most power...
...President Taft, formerly Judge Taft, would have supreme power in this republic vested in the judges...
...We all understand how easy it was for the court to do that, do we not...
...His name is Earl Gilchrist...
...Is this nation to bow its head in shame at the needless killing of an infant...
...if they would demand courteous treatment of the public by such employees and if they, themselves, would get into closer touch with the people, there would be less occasion for them to pay large sums to lawyers and lobbyists to defeat "hostile legislation...
...Must This Child Be Hanged...
...You have chastened a Congress that played false with you in 1909...
...When laws are made in these nations, no court may set them aside...
...Not by the Taft method of false-pretense, special interest tariff trading under the guise of reciprocity...
...A court not chosen by the people, that destroys or re-writes laws enacted by the people...
...Not the best court, the greatest court...
...Six years and more, you, the consumers of the United States, have been demanding that your servants in Washington grant you relief from tariff extortion...
...A court that never existed anywhere until Marshall's time, and has never existed anywhere else since his time...
...In this and the two succeeding numbers of La Follette's, Mr...
...You have rebuked, in more ways than one, a President who called that job "the best tariff ever...
...History, remote and recent, teaches us that such power, exercised presumptuously by the courts, has thwarted the political will of the people...
...A court that derives its own great powers from lines that the court itself read into the constitution—lines that the men who made the constitution refused to put into it...
...But for this an Arkansas judge decrees that the boy, scarcely in his teens, shall be taken to the gallows, blindfold adjusted, hands tied behind back, rope placed about little neck, trap sprung, and tender, immature, unformed young body left dangling in the breeze...
...Is the escutcheon of Arkansas to be blackened with this murder of a child...
Vol. 3 • September 1911 • No. 35
