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Show Giro wing Power :" , -of Courts a Real . ..-.. Menace to Liberty V . r V"fr - r t ' By C. P. CONNOLLY . Author of "Big Busness and The Bench," etc. r Srme eminent lawyers take sharp ssue with the plank in the Piogres-filvo Piogres-filvo platform which stands for the re-taU re-taU of judicial decisions others fa- vor It heartily, it is not proposed to try every law suit at the ballot bov. Aand B may liavo their dlffer-onces, dlffer-onces, and these will be adjusted, as ft now. without any appeal to the peo- f plq at large Our American couits have b" 1 t up n system, unknow n to nny ether country, whereby when a legislature passes a law, they may de-' de-' clare it void, or contrarv to the prin ciples of the constitution.' or ill ad-ised ad-ised and against public policy, or confiscatory, and so on. and the list of reasons for declaring a law fnal-id1 fnal-id1 is constantly gi owing The courts h&e also recently decided that they t can put a word in a law that was not there when It was passed, or they can tjtke a word out of n law which l was put there by the legislature, and i. thus change the entire meaning of f the law i This powei to do all these things has grown until the unshackled liberty lib-erty of the courts has become a men-' t ofe. When this now extensive pow- j er was flrbt assumed it applied onl to the right to declare unconstitutional unconstitution-al al any law which on its face- and by ' ' its terms was clearly so. And even this power, when It was first assum-1 ' eel by the courts, aroused such public pub-lic indignation that In more than one i state the judges who exercised It were r promptly retired to private life, t The constitution says that no man ' shall be deprived of his property but by due process of law. When this clause was adopted it was supposed to mean that no man's property that Is, his House, bis horse or his black slae should be taken except by the -, decree of a properly constituted le-L le-L gal tribunal, and after a fair trial Hf (Now it means, according to court Hf 'decisions, that the people shall not be allowed. Tor instance, to pass laws compelling the railroads to adopt fair nnd reasonable rates after fair and ' impartial hearing even though the m - public originally gave Imperial land H grants to the railroads and Issued H millions of dollars in bonds, to aid K in their building, or it means that the IK public may not pass laws to prevent Kf contracts of employment whereby the H health of men, women and children H . Is endangered all because the courts H Jeclare that these reforms ma com-H com-H rel the expenditure of money, or ro-H ro-H duce future dividends which, accord -H ing lo their notion, are "piopertj", H In the sense that a mans house or Ml horse is his property. And jet if a f man's house is so maintained as to T endanger the health of his neighbor- I hood, he may be compelled to abate the nuisance! If his lactory offends the health of the neighborhood, he may be compelled to abate the nuisance nuis-ance But ho may, by a bargain driven against the very necessities oi those he employs, compel them to sap and undermnc their lives and health and he must pot be molested by the law because this right of his to destroy those he hires is his i rop-ei rop-ei ty" and is "sacred " Of course the time will come when we will wonder wh we ever tolerated such doctrine, as we now wonder why. when other countries had long decried and abolished abol-ished black slavcrv, we still tolerated tolerat-ed it When certain courts strike at the home, as thev have in deciding that only the widow arid children of a person hlllel bv carelessness of era- 1 plovers shall have the right to sue. thus making it profitable for employ. lers to employ onlj single iticn whose ideaths through carelessness will cost nothing, it is time not onh to wlJen the sphere of correction so as to c'- , tend it not alone to the legislative act. hut to the judicial decree. In (doing this we do not question the motiies of judges. When the lobbyist of the corporation corpora-tion influences the legislature against necessary reforms, we have in same states adopted the inltlatixe, that we may do, or compel the legislature to do. that which It Is to the Interest of the lobbvist to see that It dogs not do. This is the most effective way of putting the professional lobbvist out of business He will not wasto his time lobbying for a bad law which he knows can be repeated by a referendum voto at the next election elec-tion nc will he seek to kill a good law which he knows the public, by initiative, has the power Itself to pass. ! So, when a court, at the behest of a I cornorntlon lawyer, adopts time-worn time-worn precedent to do jniustlce not to I A or to B, but to entire classes or l communities of citizens, wc desire to redone the right to correct this peculiar pe-culiar 'legislation" In the same way that wo correct anv other legislation legisla-tion We put the courts bick whero they he'ong the arbiters of disputes, uot the rulers of a people Wo cannot go back and change the whole theory of the law, but we can correct this evil which has come into our public lives Jefferson foresaw it and warned agaln6t It Mam-great Mam-great minds joined in condemnation 'of it in the past, and are denouncing denounc-ing it today as a usurpation bv the courts of the power of a coordinate branch of the government We do not in some states seo the "evil clearly, because It has uot been brouguc home to us. It was only as wc tried to go forward, and found ourselves hampered that we began to grope for the obstruction and found 1L Pel haps the people of California as Intelligent as any state" in the L'nlon weie tho first to see It clcarr iy tb a people. They had a constitutional constitu-tional proIsion nltSch declared that when a railroad company lowered its rates in competition with another ralliond. it should not .igain (tittor It h id subdurd or nsdlmllaled lis ' coinpotuoi ) ialt.e itn iatet to the old! Btrndard The people of Califoinia had been familiar with this trick of i driving competition from the 'field So when iho Southern Pacific had thus disposed of a competitor, ifpioccoded to a;;ain raise its rates and the supreme su-preme court merely read the pro-Vision pro-Vision out of the constitution said it did not mean what it said, although liinguage could not make the meaning mean-ing of -the constitution plainer. It Was not only the knowledge of thjs decision, hut tho knowledgo that other decisions equally plain on their face could he ocnidden and destroyed de-stroyed by judicial dcclelon that led the Cnllforninns to declare by a otc of four to one in favor of the recall of Judges Wc leave tbe judge and repcil the decision. leaiiig tho constitution con-stitution to stand as wo made and intended in-tended It If wc nave n law which says that no railroad shall run its trains through cities of over 100,000, at an elevation from the surface of less than ten feet we. do not pioposc to allow the court lo so road the law that it means ten inches Instead of ten feet. "We sa that is clearly not what we wrote, and no Just or sane man can say that It i (s though some courts may say so I We do not intend to band words with j the court or to question tho motives of Judges. We simplj apply the rem edj. This may be all GrccU to eminent llawyors, who arc ji.iid largo foes to make "white" look 'er much as if it were meant for "black," or to Judges who help them by an extra daub q'l ink to declare it "black:" but It Is vcrv plain to ordinary citizens and thals what most of us are Wc arc trjln to coirect n def iion of our couits now on the question of an income tac, b the cuinlxMSome method proldcd 'it present an amendment to our fcdci-al fcdci-al constitution through our lcgisla-tuies lcgisla-tuies But wo find that even here the loblnlst is lms at his old game n thwarting the declared purpose of the people, for, In some states, though all political parties have declared for It In their platforms, the legislatures hae refused to obo Wo 6eok by the simplest and most direct routo the unhampered expression of the peo pie. Those who belloc fn the Intelligence Intel-ligence of the peoplo for self-government cannot consistently take Issue v, lth ub Those who do not so be-llee be-llee will of course meet us with tho ancient argument of the sacredncss of our constitution, our courts and our last errors Yet Washington declared that if the people were Intelligent enough to malec a constitution the were Intelligent enough to correct It If they can correct a constitutional provision, why have thej not the righ to correct a judicial distortion of ltA If we corrected the Dred Scott decision deci-sion by resort to the bullet, why should we not correct other decisions by resort to the ballot9 |