of the vicious moral purpose that would be shown by putting it upon the statute books, but which would be utterly worthless to accomplish its avowed purpose. I have not the slightest doubt that such a law as that proposed by Mr. Bryan would, if enacted by Congress, be declared unconstitutional by a unanimous Supreme Court, unless, indeed, Mr. Bryan were able to pack this court with men appointed for the special purpose of declaring such a law constitutional." The Progressive plank against the power of the courts to punish for contempt is equally revolutionary. It declares in favor of depriving the courts of the power to punish for contempt except after a trial by jury. The crusade to deprive the courts of the power to punish for contempt began at the time of the Chicago strike of 1894 when Eugene Debs and his fellow-conspirators were found to be guilty of open, continued and defiant disobedience of an injunction order of the United States court which had been duly served upon them. It will be recalled by most of you that if the courts had not then had power to punish for contempt without a prior conviction by a jury--and imagine the chance of an impartial jury-trial during the continuance of a great riot--the Debs party would have had the city of Chicago and the great railway commerce passing through it completely at its mercy. All who want to know the facts and to realize the danger from the condition of affairs then existing should read Mr. Cleveland's account of the strike in his book on "Presidential Problems," published in 1904, and the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upholding the punishment of Debs and his associates for contempt. The power of the courts to punish for contempt has, from the earliest history of jurisprudence and as far back as the annals of our law extend, "been regarded as a necessary incident and attribute of a court, without which it could no more exist than without a judge," and "a court without the power effectually to protect itself against the assaults of the lawless or to enforce its orders, judgments, or decrees against the recusant parties before it, would be a disgrace to the legislature, and a stigma upon the age which invented it." The Supreme Court of the United States declared in the Debs case that "this is no technical rule. In order that a court may compel obedience to its orders it must have the right to inquire whether there has been any disobedience thereof. To submit the question of disobedience to another tribunal, be it a jury or another court, would operate to deprive the proceeding of half its efficiency."[63]