in the United States Senate. He has been a member of the Supreme Court for twenty-five years. Joseph McKenna, is the second member in point of seniority. He was born in 1843. He was admitted to the bar in 1865. His birth-place is Philadelphia. He was a county District Attorney, a member of the State Legislature, a member of the national House of Representatives, attorney-general of the United States and a United States Circuit Judge. He has been a member of the Supreme Court for twenty-two years. Oliver W. Holmes, the Justice who read the Debs decision, was born in Boston in 1841. He is seventy-seven years of age. He was admitted to the bar in 1866. Justice Holmes served in the Union Army; he was a member of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts and a member of the Harvard Law School Faculty. He has been a member of the Supreme Court for seventeen years. Those are the three oldest men on the Supreme bench. They are the three men who have been on the bench longest, but their political background is typical of the political background of the other members of the Supreme Court, with the single exception of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who as far as I know, held no public office at all before he was appointed a justice of the Supreme Court three years ago.
The nine members of the Supreme Court are all old men. Four of them were born before 1850; eight of them were born before 1860; one of them was born since 1861, that is, James C. McReynolds, who was born in 1862. There is not a single member of the Supreme Court bench born since the Civil War. The oldest man on the bench is Justice Holmes, seventy-seven; the youngest man on the bench is Justice McReynolds, fifty-seven; the average ages of the justices of the Supreme Court is sixty-six years. These men all began practicing law while we were children, or before we were born. Three of them
4
