le profit by their experience, or will they be indifferent to the
danger which surrounds them, until nothing short of a political upheaval
can restore to them these rights of sovereignty, of which they have so
insidiously been deprived?

Human gratitude is such that even high-minded men who, through the
influence of the railroad interest, have been placed upon the Federal
bench, find it impossible to divest themselves of all bias when called
upon to decide a case in which their benefactors are interested. Such is
the human mind that, when clouded by prejudice, it will forever be blind
to its own fault. Even the members of so high a tribunal as the
Electoral Commission which decided the presidential contest between
Hayes and Tilden could not divest themselves of their prejudices; each
one, Republican or Democrat, voted for the candidate of the party with
which he had cast his political fortune.

Last January, in an address delivered before the New York State Bar
Association at Albany, Mr. Justice Brewer reminded his hearers that the
rights of the railroads "stand as secure in the eye and in the custody
of the law as the purposes of justice in the thought of God." And
further on they were told that "there are to-day $11,000,000,000
invested in railroad property, whose owners in this country number less
than two million persons. Can it be that whether that immense sum shall
earn a dollar or bring the slightest recompense to those who have
invested perhaps their all in that business, and are thus aiding in the
development of the country, depends wholly upon the whim and greed of
that great majority of sixty millions who do not own a dollar? It may be
said that that majority will not be so foolish, selfish and cruel as to
strip that property of its earning capacity. I say that so long as
constitutional guarantees lift on American soil their buttresses and
bulwarks against wrong, and so long as the American judiciary breathes
the free air of courage, it cannot."

Unfortunately judicial buttresses and bulwarks have not always been
lifted against wrong. Judge Taney, like Brewer, supposed that it was
left at his time for his court to preserve the peace and provide for the
safety of the nation; but history has shown that we cannot depend upon
that high tribunal for safety when it is controlled by weak or
inefficient men.

When we consider what "that great majority" has done for this country in
the past, and is doing for it at