JUSTICE HOLMES

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court, a graduate of Harvard in the Class of 1861, is now the oldest man who has ever sat on the bench of this highest tribunal of the nation. At eighty-seven years of age he passes the record of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, his ability to see the whole as well as the minutiae of legal disputes undimmed by the years. Many lawyers have found in him a new keenness of attack, born since he left behind the retiring age of seventy. He has never been a didacticist; the law has always been a tool to his hand rather than a monstrous, all-enveloping Principle. He has recognized that the preventive is forever superior to the punitive in lawmaking. When President Roosevelt in 1902 took him from the supreme court bench of Massachusetts to serve the nation it was in the realization that the war against trusts would need trained umpires, whom the fanaticism of a people berserk would not lead into for getting that there is such a thing as a desirable monopoly. Sumptuary legislation meets in him an erect hard-thinking foe.

Forty years ago, when Justice Holmes was Judge Holmes, he told his conception of the law in words of rare beauty:

"When I think of the law I see a princess mightier than she who once wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever lengthening past-figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life."