istic of our system of government. It nullifies it; it sets it at naught; it casts to the winds that protection of justice that our fathers established and that has made us with all our power a just and orderly people. For, sir, when we say to the judge upon the bench, who is bound to assert the rules of justice established in a constitution long years before for the restraint of the people in their passion or their prejudice, you shall decide for the rules of justice at your peril; when we say to the judge, if you maintain the abstract rule of justice against the wish of the people at the moment, you shall be turned out of office in ignominy, we nullify the rule of justice and we establish the rule of the passion, prejudice, and interest of the moment. So, sir, I say that this provision of the Arizona constitution strikes at the very heart of our system of government. It goes deeper than that. This provision, sir, is not progress, it is not reform; it is degeneracy. It is a movement backward to those days of misrule and unbridled power out of which the world has been slowly progressing under the leadership of those great men who established the Constitution of the United States. It is a move backward to those days when human passion and the rule of men obtained rather than the law and the rule of principles; for it ignores, it sets at naught the great principle of government and of civilized society, the principle that justice is above majorities. I care not how small may be the numbers of a political faith or a religious sect, I care not how weak and humble may be a single man accused of however atrocious a crime, time was when the feelings and the passions and the wish of a majority determined his rights and oftentimes his right to life; but now, in this twentieth century, with all the light of the civilization of our times, after a century and a quarter passed by this great and free people following the footsteps of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison, now with all the peoples of the world following their footsteps in the establishment of constitutional governments, the hand of a single man appealing to that justice which exists independently of all majorities has a power that we cannot ignore or deny but at the sacrifice of the best and the noblest elements of government. There is such a thing as justice, and though the greatest and most arrogant majority unite to override it, God stands behind it, the eternal laws that rule the world maintain it; and if we attempt to make the administration and award of justice dependent upon the will of a majority, we shall fail, and we shall fail at the cost of humiliation and ignominy to ourselves. I do not envy the men who prefer the uncontrolled rule of a majority free from the restraints which we have imposed upon ourselves, to the system of orderly government that we have now established. I do not envy the men who would rather have the French constituent convention, controlled by Marat and Danton and Robespierre, than to have a Supreme Court presided over by Marshall; who would rather have conclusions upon a question of justice reached by a popular election on the basis of newspaper reports than to have the impartial judgment of a great court. I do not envy the men who have no sympathy with Malesherbes and De Sèze pleading for the lawful rights of Louis XVI against the dictates of the majority of the French capital in 1793. I do not envy the men who see nothing to admire in John Adams defending the British soldiers against the protests of his neighbors and friends and countrymen, after the Boston Massacre. Rather, sir, would I feel that my country loves justice and possesses that divine power of self-restraint without which the man remains the child, the citizen remains the savage, and the community becomes the commune; that my country has carried into its system of law, and, whatever be its wish for the moment, whatever its prejudice, whatever its passion for the moment, will forever maintain as of greater importance than any single issue or any single man or any single interest; that reverence for the eternal principles of justice which we have embedded in our fundamental law as our nearest approach to the application of the divine command to human affairs. THE RECALL OF JUDGES REMARKS IN THE REPUBLICAN STATE CONVENTION AT At the New York State Convention, held at Rochester, N. Y., April 9–10, 1912, the following, among other resolutions, was adopted: We oppose the recall of judges or any system which will introduce cowardice as an element in the administration of justice. The authority of the judiciary should not be impaired. Respect for the courts once broken down, the constitutional protection of the liberties of the individual would be destroyed. Upon this resolution, dealing with the recall of judges and of judicial decisions, Mr. Root spoke as follows: HAVE risen to second the resolutions reported by your committee, but I shall confine what I have to say to a single subject treated in this series of resolutions, the subject which covers the attempt to interfere with the independence and destroy the authority of the judicial department of our Government. I confine myself to this because I regard it as of overshadowing and overwhelming importance. We may change our tariff laws, and if we are not satisfied with them we may change them again. We may change our method of nominating officers, and if the system does not work right we can change it again. We can change our method of electing officers and change it again. All the ordinary laws which affect the conduct of business and the relations of men to each other and the powers of government in general may be changed and rechanged to suit the developing feelings and interests and opinions of the people; but the duty of submitting our will, whether it be the will of the individual or the will of the greatest majority that ever gathered at the polls, to the eternal principles of justice, that can never be changed without the degradation of the people who reject it. The founders of our Republic were wise men in more ways than one. They understood history and the philosophy of government, and they understood human nature. They were students and they were men of affairs, and they founded our Government upon two basic propositions, upon two underlying truths. One of them was the truth that you and I learned in our childhood, for we came of a God-fearing people as they did. We learned and we should not forget that our natures are weak, prone to error, subject to fall into temptation and to be led astray by impulse. All the history of religion, of morality, of government, all the history of man, teems with universal and overwhelming proof of this great truth, upon a recognition of which our civil society rests. They knew, too, that men are no more perfect in the mass than they are as individuals. They knew that indeed when men come together or act in great bodies free from the sense of personal responsibility, they will often do things that they would shrink from doing as individuals. The party whose vitality has brought us here was founded upon resistance to the spread of that doctrine under which vast majorities, overwhelming majorities in the states covering nearly one-half of our land, majorities composed of men as true, as honorable, as noble, as live in America, or anywhere on earth, united in holding millions of black men slaves. The life of the Republican party was a protest against that rule of the majorities in the South. We live as an organized protest against the majorities that defy the rule of justice. One other great fundamental principle they based themselves upon, and that was that there is only one way in which man can control his own tendencies to error, and that is by the recognition, the adoption and the enforcement upon himself of declared principles of right conduct. So throughout the history of the world the assertion of |