"I am informed that these four gentlemen attacked the statements as being contrary to both the facts and the law. The first was the case of the tenement-house cigar manufacturers. Now I will read to you what is said by one of the women who knows the conditions of tenement-house life as few other women, and as hardly any man, knows them, by Florence Kelly in a book called 'Some Ethical Gains through Legislation,' and I cordially commend to Mr. Root and his associates who signed his protest to study that book and to ponder what is meant by the word 'ethical' in connection with legislation. Of the Jacobs case, to which I referred, Mrs. Kelly says: 'To the decision of the Court of Appeals in the case In re Jacobs is directly due the continuance of the tenement manufacture and of the sweating system in the United States and its present prevalence in New York.' That is the statement of a woman who, as regards knowledge of tenement-house conditions, knows so much more than those four great corporation lawyers that her little finger is thicker than their loins when you come to study what they know and what she knows of the subject of which they have ignorantly presumed to speak." And yet all that these lawyers did was to point out the inaccuracy of Mr. Roosevelt's statements as to what the courts had held, and to suggest that this inaccuracy would be demonstrated by reference to the records of the courts, which are open to all who care to take the trouble to ascertain the truth. It should be recalled in connection with any fair and candid consideration of the Tenement House case that the constitutional convention of 1894 had ample opportunity to change the rule in that case if it had then been thought to interfere with the attainment of "social justice." Although the subject was called to the attention of the convention, it was deemed advisable to make no change. The rule is reasonable and well-settled in the interpretation of constitutions and it was well known to the distinguished members of that convention that "where a clause or provision in a constitution, which has received a settled judicial construction, is adopted in the same words by the framers of another constitution, it will be presumed that the construction thereof was likewise adopted."