These three cases are legal landmarks showing the limitations of industrial warfare. They are what the lawyers call "leading cases." They lay down clearly and dispassionately the law which marks the rights of the public to remain unmolested by the conflict of labor and capital at war. Such decisions are in American law what the Treaty of Paris is in the Law of Nations--a declaration of the rights of neutrals. If, as a candidate for the presidency, Mr. Taft is to suffer from unpopularity created in any quarter by these decisions which he made as judge, he must endure it, for the search for popularity is not a part of the functions of a judge. _The Courage of Great Judges_ The picture of Taft in the Phelan case, reading in a court-room crowded with angry and hostile men a decision which was to send their leader to jail; a decision which was to play a large part in determining one of the most distressing industrial wars of our day;--this picture recalls another court, another great occasion long ago. In 1768 John Wilkes, who had been prosecuted relentlessly by the British Crown, and who had been outlawed and driven to France, returned to England, appeared before Lord Mansfield in the Court of Kings Bench, and demanded that the judgment of outlawry be reversed. The nation was frenzied by faction. Abuse and threats of personal violence were heaped upon the Chief Justice. In a court-room crowded with the enemies of Wilkes, the greatest of English judges reversed and annulled the decree of outlawry. In doing it, he gave what seemed a death blow to his own favor with the King, who had placed the judicial ermine on his shoulders. After he had rendered this judgment, facing the angry sycophants of the Crown, he spoke these words: If during the King's reign I have ever supported his government and assisted his measures, I have done it without any other reward than the consciousness of doing what I thought right. If I have ever opposed, I have done it upon the points themselves, without mixing in party or faction, and without any collateral views. I honor the King and respect the people; but many things required by the favor of either are, in my account, objects not worth ambition. I wish popularity, but it is that popularity which follows, not that which is run after. It is that popularity which, sooner or later, never fails to do justice to the pursuit of noble ends by noble means. I will not do that which my conscience tells me is wrong, upon this occasion, to gain the huzzas of thousands, or the daily praise of all the papers which come from the press. I will not avoid doing what I think is right, though it should draw on me the whole artillery of libels; all that falsehood and malice can invent or that the credulity of a deluded populace can swallow.