Understand me, gentlemen, I am not venturing in this presence to impeach
the law. For the present, by the force of circumstances, I am in part
the embodiment of the law, and it would be very awkward to disavow
myself. But I do wish to make this intimation, that in this time of
world change, in this time when we are going to find out just how, in
what particulars, and to what extent the real facts of human life and
the real moral judgments of mankind prevail, it is worth while looking
inside our municipal law and seeing whether the judgments of the law are
made square with the moral judgments of mankind. For I believe that we
are custodians, not of commands, but of a spirit. We are custodians of
the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit of equal-handed justice, of
the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with
the perfectibility of human life itself.
Public life, like private life, would be very dull and dry if it were
not for this belief in the essential beauty of the human spirit and the
belief that the human spirit could be translated into action and into
ordinance. Not entire. You cannot go any faster than you can advance the
average moral judgments of the mass, but you can go at least as fast as
that, and you can see to it that you do not lag behind the average moral
judgments of the mass.
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