Life — May 12, 1910 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“While there is Life there's Hope.” VOL. LY. MAY 2B, 1910 No. 1437 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY ALMILLRR, Sec'y and Treas, New York. A hes FT in the White House and Hughes in the Supreme Court —_ look to merely hu- man ion like pathetic examples of the sarcasm of destiny. Resignation to a cast that assigns these parts to these particular performers comes somewhat painfully, and mainly as an act of faith based on acceptance of the principle that whatever is is right. To be sure, it takes no great effort to continue to believe, in spite of abun- dant assurance to the contrary, that Judge Taft is too big and sound a man to be a failure as President, and it is still easier to surmise that there is enough timber and enough law in Governor Hughes to make a useful Justice of the Supreme Court. But the ordinary observer must go on thinking for the present that each of these admirable and useful gentlemen has got the assignment that by right of natural talent and proclivity be- longed to the other. It seems to be pretty generally ac- cepted that because Mr. Hughes has made a very notable Governor of New York he will make a very notable United States Judge. Mr. Taft seems to feel so, and he has been rated a good judge of judicial talent. Whether that is so time will ascertain, though it may not tell. If Mr. Hughes has it in him té be a great judge let no one grudge the court his presence in it, for the country does not offer a more im- portant service than the one which is presently to engage his powers. His appointment emphasizes the need long appreciated of adding seven or eight thousand dollars to the sala- ries of the Supreme Court Justices. JA MITCHELL, Preste, "LTP Ee There is a better prospect than usual that it will be done. There are al- ways plenty of rich and able lawyers who are ready to accept appointments to the Supreme Court without regard to the salary, but when such an ap- pointment goes to a poor man of large earning capacity, whose slender savings have been depleted by two terms as Governor of the indigent State of New York, the propriety of paying the judges respectable salaries becomes im- pressive. The whole congregation of Federal Judges are seriously under- paid. The district judges should re- ceive about ten thousand dollars in- stead of six and the Circuit Judges about twelve instead of seven. For the nine Judges of the Supreme Court, twenty thousand a year apiece would be a moderate provision. And the State of New York should raise the salary of its Governor. Mr. Hughes will go out of office tired out with exhausting work, and poorer by many thousand dollars, because he has had to pay out of his own pocket for the privilege of serving seven millions of his countrymen. N article in Collier's Weekly for April 2, entitled “ Ballinger— Shyster,” gave an account of certain professional behaviors of Richard A. Ballinger while practicing law in Seat- tle in 1900, which, as there set forth, were so very damaging to Mr. Ballin- ger’s reputation as to make the reader hesitate to accept them as they stood, and constrained him to wonder if there was not another side to the story. It constrained Lire to wonder in its issue of April 21 whether Collier's was proceeding with discretion in its deal- ings with Ballinger, and to say that while Mr. Ballinger seemed a bad choice for the place he fills, “these later stories are so saturated with hos- tility that courteous readers want to hear the other side.” It was writ- ten “cautious readers,” but the types twisted it. Apropos of which Collier's last week requested Lire to read its latest pres- entation of “The American Dreyfus Case,” and then to say: (1) “Has it been convinced by preceding evidence that the rebellion of Glavis prevent- ed the Guggenheims from perfecting their monopoly of Alaska? (2) ‘Is it now convinced that Mr. Wicker. sham and the President suppressed the truth and punished and disgraced the men who stood for public duty?” To both questions we have to make the same reply: It looks so to us. But we should add that most of our in- formation on this subject is derived from Collier's Weekly. Of the Presi- dent and Mr. Wickersham we should prefer to say that they seem to have missed the truth rather than that they suppressed it. As to the Guggen- heims’s monopoly of Alaska, we still retain the impression that there might have been something left over in that territory for the rest of mankind, even if the Guggenheims had got control of enough coal to feed their railroad and smelt their copper ores. That we have impressions rather than convic- tions as to these matters is due to a feeling that we have paid more atten- tion to the prosecution than to the de- fense, and have not dealt faithfully enough with the record of the inquiry proceedings to feel warranted in pro- claiming a final opinion. We even dis- cern a possibility that the Dreyfus in Collier's Dreyfus case may be Bal- linger rather than Glavis. In watching football games—a sport in which we are not expert—we seldom know at any given moment what is going on, or the value or purpose of any par- ticular spasm. Yet we have observed that we have usually been able to gain a valid impression as to which side was getting the better of it, and to learn at the end who won and by what score. So in the Ballinger inquiry, while we have not entire confidence in the pene- tration of our observations, nor yet that the majority of the inquirers will bring in a report that matches the evi- dence, still we have nursed the hope that we should know, when the inquiry was over, which side licked and by how much, We shall be grateful if Collier's will indulge us in deferring our final opinion until the jury has tried to agree upon a verdict. comicbooks.com