◆ SpookStack

Ae 1 * 7 ON D JARDING THE DIC... aARY By Booth Tarkington My father, at the age of ninety-one, told me he didn't feel old enough to glory in it! It is only to the young that the old seem old. When we're ten. thirty seems pretty old, and when we're twenty we look npon people who get married after the age of forty as ludicrous and even rather scandalous. To the President's young middle-age and equipment of splendid vitality, which we hope will be the same forty years from now, the age of seventy seems superannuated. To the painter, Titian, working hard at ninety-nine and then cut off untimely by the bubonic plague. seventy didn’t seem old at all. To Titian, seventy seemed the age at which he'd just begun really to know how to handle the tools of his trade. Most of the disastrous mistakes recorded in history were made by men in middle-age. younger middle-age and youth. I pause to mention merely as an infinitesimal item of the prodigious list, Napoleon at Waterloo, Wilkes Booth and Pontius Pilate. lu the view of anvhody who doesn't prefer dust in his eyes, there are very few living men who wouldn't nerd to be at least seventy to be qualified to sit on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. However, after listening attentively to orations by advo- cates of the bill, and after reading reports of the many state- ments and arguments in favor of it, I find that what remains m my mind, as the boiled-down grist of what I have heard and read, may be expressed more simply as follows: “These judges are too old because we've got to get ‘em out of the way in order to change the Constitution without changing it.” That is to say, the praponents of the bill do not only admit, they urge and proclaim that the present judges must be removed, or overwhelmed, because they stand in the way of certain policies. We may understand the matter better if we pause to inquire here: How do the judges stand in the way_ vf those policies * The first part of the answer to that question seems to rest npon the fact that we. the people, are not infallible. Political orators often tell us we are: but we know better. We often reverse Gur miost passionate opinions. We threw out the Democratic party after Mr. Wilson. We threw out the Repub- lican party after Mr. Hoover. We threw in Prohibition with great enthusiasm; we threw it out uproariously! Even our Presidents are not infallible: and we prove how thoroughly we believe this by the way we reverse ourselves and turn on them, bringing to mind an old aphorism, “Republics are ungrateful.” The framers of the Constitution understood our fallibility. Thev knew that they themselves, being human, needed to be protected from their own impulses. They knew that we, and o Pat ra ald asad our Presidents wo ee Iso, would need this same protection. That i Constitution and its careful provision for amendments. The founders of the country knew that neither one man nor men in the mass are to be trusted to think rightly, or for the general best interest, in a Jarry. Moreover, as the Constitution is the charter of our liberty, and therefore it is vital to us all that the words of the document should never be misunderstood or misapplied, its framers provided us with a dictionary. In regard to the Constitution of the United States, that’s what the Supreme Court is. In essence and reality it is a dictionary. a why we have a The judges do not govern the people; and, as for the policies in the way of which the present judges are alleged to stand as obstacles, the judges do not condemn those policies, nor praise them, nor in any manner criticize them, Some of the judges and possibly, so far as we know, all of them may afPprove of those policies; it is not their business to tell us whether they do or not. Their business is solely with the words and groups of words used in the Constitution of the United States and its Amendments. They are simply the highest authority we have on the meaning of those words and groups of words. All the judges can tell us is what those words mean and, by the Constitution itself, their majority vpinion, no matter by how large or small a majority, seétles the meaning of the word or groups of words in the Constitu- tion. The judges do not say to all of us or to any one of us, “You shall do this thing or that thing!” or “You shall not do ‘this thing or that thing!’ They only say, “The word black means black; the word white means wiite.” Proponents of the bill declare that its real purpose is to replace the present judges with men who will have the present President's good purposes so much at heart that, in order to forward them, they will say to us, the people, “The word black means white; the word white means black.” That is to say, we shall henceforth have no dictionary. The words in our Constitution will henceforth mean whatever -any President—good President or bad President, strong President or weak President, intelligent President or stupid President (and we have had all of these and shall again)— the words of which our Constitution is composed will hence- forth mean what any President wants them to mean. President Roosevelt knows his own good intentions and benevolent purpose; but we, the people—or at least many of us—are permitted to doubt if he Aimself would care to take this risk if he were one of us, a private citizen-—and if Mr. Henry Ford, for instance, were President! We're pretty confident, in fact, that if this were the case, Mr. Roosevelt would prefer to keep the dictionary.