To render judges subject to recall would be utterly destructive of the character and independence of our judiciary. No self-respecting lawyer would serve on the bench under such conditions. An upright judge should fearlessly declare and enforce the law without regard to popular agitation or political pressure. Frequently he is called upon to decide between the individual on the one side and a clamorous majority on the other side of a case before him. Take, for example, our situation in New York with Tammany Hall controlling a majority of the voters of the city. The legislature at the dictation of Mr. Murphy passes another infamous Levy Election Law avowedly intended to prevent independent nominations even for the bench. The judges declare the act unconstitutional and protect the minority in their rights, just as we saw them protecting the Progressives a few weeks ago. According to Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Straus, however, Tammany Hall should have the power to punish these judges by recalling them and should have the right to pass such disgraceful and tyrannical legislation by resort to the initiative and the referendum! Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of a scheme more surely calculated to shatter all our constitutional rights, as well as all certainty in the law. Chief Justice Marshall would have been repeatedly recalled for unpopular decisions which are now universally applauded even by the Progressives. Imagine the spectacle of recalling a Cullen or a Gray because he had dared to decide against the clamor or wishes of a majority controlled by Tammany Hall! I have nowhere seen a stronger statement of the objections to the recall of judges than in John Stuart Mill's work on "Representative Government," published in 1861, where he said: "If a judge could be removed from office by a popular vote, whoever was desirous of supplanting him would make capital for that purpose out of all his judicial decisions; would carry all of them, as far as he found practicable, by irregular appeal before a public opinion wholly incompetent, for want of having heard the case, or from having heard it without either the precautions or the impartiality belonging to a judicial hearing; would play upon popular passion and prejudice where they existed, and take pains to arouse them where they did not. And in this, if the case were interesting, and he took sufficient trouble, he would infallibly be successful, unless the judge or his friends descended into the arena, and made equally powerful appeals on the other side. Judges would end by feeling that they risked their office upon every decision they gave in a case susceptible of general interest, and that it was less essential for them to consider what decision was just, than what would be most applauded by the public, or would least admit of insidious misrepresentation."