of personal rights, and contentions about property into questions of social and politi cal gravity; and unfortunately affecting again topics which ranged masses against classes. A new popular upheaval came when Federal judges undertook to assert the dignity of their courts by the familiar inherent and necessary power of summary proceedings for contempt. For, said many popular leaders, it is monstrous that, while allowing a contempt of court to be a criminal offense, instead of invoking the aid of Grand and Petit Jury, a judge should unite in his own person, like the Pooh Bah in the comic opera of the Mikado, several distinct functions, and pose as complainant, as jury, and as punisher by imprisonment. Shrewd politicians took up the cry, and from many hustings came the plea that not only the Supreme Court fa vored millionaires and corporations by over turning the income tax which favored the poor, but that other Federal Courts oppressed the laborer by summary injunction. Unhap pily for judicial traditions and suitor comity the ermine became dragged in the political mire. No Coxey army, however, marched to Washington to reckon with the judges, as counsellor Carter had suggested, but Coxey himself and some partisan comrades marched to a Western city and there, in regular con vention, fashioned this plank of a party platform : — "We declare that it is the duty of Con gress to use all the constitutional power which remains, after that decision (against the income tax), or which may come from its reversal by the court, as it may hereafter be constituted, so that the burdens of taxa tion may be equally and impartially laid, to the end that we may all bear our proportion of the expenses of Government." Naturally it is criticised sharply by an opposite party, yet, oddly enough, by the very party which originated political criticism of the same tribunal under an earlier judicial composition. In 1860 the National platform declared the new dogma, that the Constitu
tion of its own force carries slavery into any or all of the Territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, ... is revo lutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country. . . . We deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislature, or of any individuals (meaning judges of the Supreme Court), to give legal existenc.e to slavery in any Terri tory of the United States. As is historically known, these sentences were drafted by delegate William M. Evarts, who, with pro found respect, as his whole legal career shows, for courts, preferred to use the euphemistic phrase " any individuals " to the word " judges." These glances at history show, without any necessity of outlining views or taking posi tions respecting the quoted plank of the political platform that summons the Supreme Court into the political arena, in what way the summons has come about. Another political party is, by its tenets, demanding that the judges of the Supreme Court shall, by amendment of the Constitu tion, change the present mode of their selection into such a popular election by the voters of the entire Union as it also demands for direct choice of President and Vice-President without the machinery of electoral colleges. In a way there were in the Federal Constitutional Convention a few who might be termed, after a phrase of to day, Populists, who were willing to trust the people with all functions of selecting officials much after the early spirit of the New Eng land town meeting; as reference to the debates — unfortunately raggedly reported — seem to show. But the arguments of the large majority in that Convention which adopted the present system of choosing judges with life tenure, together with the essays in that classic volume, the Federalist, and the views of Joseph Story in his Com mentaries on the Constitution, remain for consultation and are seemingly as strong to day as they all were when written. But
