Friends, it is idle for any man to ask me to sit unmoved and without protest when a court makes a decision like that [cries of “Good” and applause], and it is a waste of time to tell me, as Mr. Taft did in his speech, that I am laying an impious hand on the ark of the covenant when I try to secure the reversal of such a decision. [Laughter and applause.] Now wait. I have only just begun. [Applause.] I am sorry for you, but I will get through as quick as I can. [Voices: “Go on, go on.”] THE LAW THAT WAS PASSED. Then we passed a law providing that in factories there should be safeguards over all the dangerous machinery, and a girl working in a factory had her arm taken off above the elbow by an unprotected flywheel. She sued and recovered damages, and the court of appeals of the State of New York threw out her case, and there was another gem in their opinion. They said that they would not permit the legislature to interfere with the liberty of that girl to work amidst dangerous machinery. [Laughter.] Now you can see yourselves――you can look up. I will refer anyone who wants to look it up to the exact decisions where this language occurred. The liberty of that girl was protected by the court――the liberty; she had the liberty to starve or to work under the conditions offered her, and she had no other liberty. [Applause.] DREADFUL DENIAL OF JUSTICE. And I hold that it was a dreadful denial of justice to prevent that poor girl from recovering for the accident due to the criminal carelessness of her employer, and I, for one, will never rest when there is a decision like that on the books until we have got it repealed. [“Good! Good!” and cheers.] I could give you 20 such cases. I will only give you 2 more――only 2 more. Then in the next case that came up that I refer to we passed a law, modeled on your Massachusetts law, a law forbidding women to be worked in factories more than 10 hours a day or after 9 o’clock at night. Friends, personally, I thought that was an utterly insufficient law. I felt that it did not go nearly far enough. Your Massachusetts law prohibits them from working more than 9 hours a day and after 6 o’clock at night. Ours did not go as far. It was with reluctance that I could make myself accept it at all. I did simply because it was the best we could get at that time. At that time girls and women in factories, in sweatshops, were being worked 12, 14, sometimes 16 hours a day and until 10, 11, and 12 at night. THE COURT’S BARRIER. The Massachusetts court held that your law was constitutional; but our law, which did not go as far, the Court of Appeals of the State of New York held as unconstitutional, and there was this further gem in the language――the court said that there had been altogether too much legislation of this kind in the United States and the time had come for the court fearlessly to oppose the barrier of its judgment against it.