mes it is very virulent and very dangerous.
There have been courts in the United States which were controlled by
private interests. There have been supreme courts in our states before
which plain men could not get justice. There have been corrupt judges;
there have been controlled judges; there have been judges who acted as
other men's servants and not as the servants of the public. Ah, there are
some shameful chapters in the story! The judicial process is the ultimate
safeguard of the things that we must hold stable in this country. But
suppose that that safeguard is corrupted; suppose that it does not guard
my interests and yours, but guards merely the interests of a very small
group of individuals; and, whenever your interest clashes with theirs,
yours will have to give way, though you represent ninety per cent. of the
citizens, and they only ten per cent. Then where is your safeguard?

The just thought of the people must control the judiciary, as it controls
every other instrument of government. But there are ways and ways of
controlling it. If,--mark you, I say _if_,--at one time the Southern
Pacific Railroad owned the supreme court of the State of California, would
you remedy that situation by recalling the judges of the court? What good
would that do, so long as the Southern Pacific Railroad could substitute
others for them? You would not be cutting deep enough. Where you want to
go is to the process by which those judges were selected. And when you get
there, you will reach the moral of the whole of this discussion, because
the moral of it all is that the people of the United States have
suspected, until their suspicions have been justified by all sorts of
substantial and unanswerable evidence, that, in place after place, at
turning-points in the history of this country, we have been controlled by
private understandings and not by the public interest; and that influences
which were improper, if not corrupt, have determined everything from the
making of laws to the administration of justice. The disease lies in the
region where these men get their nominations; and if you can recover for
the people the _selecting_ of judges, you will not have to trouble about
their recall. Selection is of more radical consequence than election.

* * * * *

I am aware that those who advocate these measures which we have been
discussing are denounced as dangerous radicals. I am particularly
interested