s best that the
Supreme Court be subject to the same policy. It is ridiculous that our
representatives should be made such by popular vote, and the laws they
make be construed by a set of judges whose office expires only when the
spirit judge has a harp, and the dust judge has a coffin. Popular vote
retires the inferior judge, a fashionable funeral retires the supreme
judge, but the robe is left as the imperial emblem. It seems to me it
is time to abolish the life tenure of office with our Supreme Court,
and it is entirely fitting that their robes be hung in the curio hall
of some popular museum, as a souvenir of a ridiculous custom no longer
desirable in a popular government. Let me here drop a thought. You may
have it for what you think it is worth. The expressed will of a
majority of the people should be the Supreme Court decision in the
United States. Were that the case an income tax would be
constitutional, and a tariff between the states and some territory
owned and controlled by our government would be unconstitutional.

Since the victory at Yorktown, great questions have been argued and
settled by the laboring men and inventors; great questions have been
argued, but not settled, by the politicians. Washington used candles,
we use electric lights. Washington's four men picked the seed from
twenty-five pounds of cotton per day; four men in our generation, gin
25,000 pounds per day; Washington traveled with horses and oxen, thirty
miles per day; we travel by steam 1,000 miles per day; Washington sent
a letter one hundred miles and waited a week for the answer; we
telegraph thousands of miles and get an answer within the hour;
Washington's voice could be heard a quarter of a mile; we talk and
carry on conversation hundreds of miles. Each of these propositions,
and thousands of others have been settled by the inventors and toilers.
In short and in fine, the difference between the United States with her
natural resources of 125 years ago, and the United States of today,
with her vast farms, great mines, magnificent cities and half a hundred
thousand miles of railroad, and other improvements too numerous to
mention, all this difference, I say, is co-extensive with America
_before and after_ taking the labor treatment. But what can we say of
the politician and his doings during these years, stripped of all
ambiguity, when we tell the unpolished, but plain truth, we must say he
never advanced one iota until he was routed