The judges invoked a technical construction of the Constitution in order to declare invalid a law deliberately enacted by the legislative body; a law which I firmly believe it was entirely in the province of the Legislature to pass. Every consideration of public morals and public weal demanded that it should be declared valid. At the present day few courts in any State of the Union would make such a decision as was then made; yet the judges making it were learned in the law, and according to their own lights were upright and honorable men. But they were men without any sympathetic understanding or knowledge of the needs and conditions of life of the great mass of their fellow-countrymen. If those judges had understood “how the other half lived,” if they had possessed a working knowledge of tenement-houses and factories, of tenement-house dwellers and factory workers, and of the lives that were lived where the tenement-house and the factory were one and the same, I am absolutely certain that they would have rendered no such decision as was rendered. They knew the life of the well-to-do, both the business life and the home life. They knew nothing of the lives of those who were not well-to-do. It was this lack of knowledge and the attendant lack of sympathetic understanding that formed the real barrier between the judges and a wise judgment. My reason for relating this anecdote is because from that day to this I have felt an ever-growing conviction of the need of having on the bench men who, in addition to being learned in the law and upright, shall possess a broad understanding of and sympathy with their countrymen as a whole, so that the questions of humanity and of social justice shall not be considered by them as wholly inferior to the defense of vested rights or the upholding of liberty of contract. A hair-splitting refinement in decisions may result in as much damage to the community as if the judge were actually corrupt. Freedom of contract should be permitted only so far as is compatible with the best interests of the community; and when vested rights become intrenched wrongs, they should be overturned. I do not for one moment believe that the mass of our judges are actuated by any but worthy motives. Nevertheless, I do believe that they often signally fail to protect the laboring man and the laboring man’s widow and children in their just rights, and that heartbreaking and pitiful injustice too often results therefrom; and this primarily because our judges lack either the opportunity or the power thoroughly to understand the working man’s and working woman’s position and vital needs.