The two qualities which make a great judge are wisdom and moral courage. No great judge ever lived who did not possess them both. When the Phelan case was on trial before Judge Taft, it was a time of tremendous excitement. It was the very crisis of a great strike. The friends of the Judge feared for his life and asked him not to read his decision from the bench. He read it. The last sentence of that decision directed the marshal safely to convey Phelan to the Warren County Jail. When he read that final sentence he turned to the packed court-room and looking squarely into the angry faces before him said: "If there is any power in the army of the United States to run those trains, the trains will be run." To those who honor judicial courage no less than judicial wisdom, such occasions deserve to be recalled and remembered, for they are part of the great traditions of the bench. But these decisions are not solely declarations of public rights. They contain statements of the legal rights of labor organizations in strikes, stated so clearly that the decisions have been cited time and again in subsequent litigation by labor organizations themselves as precedents in their favor. They affirm unequivocally the right of labor organizations to strike to better the condition of their members, and the right to use peaceable persuasion to prevent other employees from taking the place of strikers, a right which in some jurisdictions, particularly Pennsylvania, has been denied. _The Right to Strike_ Quite apart from his judicial decisions, Taft's position on the strike question is clearly stated in public addresses. Last January, at Cooper Institute, he said to an audience of workingmen: "Now what is the right of the labor unions with respect to the strike? I know that there has been at times a suggestion in the law that no strike can be legal. I deny this. Men have the right to leave the employ of their employer in a body in order to impose on him as great an inconvenience as possible to induce him to come to their terms. They have the right in their labor unions to delegate to a leader power to say when to strike. They have the right in advance to accumulate by contributions of all members of the labor union a fund which shall enable them to live during the strike. They have the right to use persuasion with all other employees who are invited to take their places in order to convince them of the advantage to labor of united action. It is the business of the courts and the police to respect these rights with the same degree of care that they respect the owners of capital in the protection of their property and business."