658
THE GREEN BAG
largely with controversies growing out of such peculiar branches of law as patents, public lands, bankruptcy, revenue, and com merce, interstate or foreign; passing upon the profoundest issues of constitutional law and congressional legislation; our federal judges require for efficient service a peculiar legal training and aptitude. An experience in Congress or in the administrative branch of government is by no means inappropriate here, if one brings, to the federal court of higher or lower degree good legal acquire ments, besides character and integrity, and a growing capacity for active work. Pro motion from the district or circuit courts comes fitly to United States judges young enough to make a good reputation still better. The time was when circuit courts were swept away by Congress and circuit judicial tenure disappeared with the juris diction itself, but never so with our Supreme Court sitting at Washington. That tribunal has remained continuous from 1789, and free from innovation except for the number of justices allowed or the range of business; lesser courts of the United States may indeed be changed or remod elled any time at the will of Congress, but the Supreme Court itself is permanent and continuous, for so the federal constitution created it. This establishment, the head and crown of our whole judicial system as concerns the Union, and the federal tribunal of last appeal, remains as perpetual in func tions, as intact and independent as Congress itself or the Executive. No law can abolish or supersede it; no presidential fiat can change the incumbency; nor even can the compensation of any one of the justices be diminished (though Congress has power to increase it) while he remains in office. The distinguished attention and consideration which these supreme judges, one and all, receive at the nation's capital, has no coun terpart elsewhere on the American conti nent. At state dinners and on all ceremonial occasions their high rank and precedence are as fixed and positive as those of dukes
or marquises in an European court; their decorous assemblage in black gowns for business at the old Senate chamber of the capitol — alone of all national dignitaries at Washington to wear robes of office — is one of the choice sights for casual specta tors in that city. They constitute a close and intimate fraternity among themselves; and whoever of their number may choose to mingle in the high social functions of the winter, or instead to live in seclusion, his choice will be respected. From 1789 down to the present time the selection of justices for this noted court has been made with due regard to the public welfare and the promptings of propriety. Each President, as vacancies have arisen, has shown a becoming sense of the example which Washington himself set when organ izing the court originally. The Senate has almost constantly exercised its own con firming power as though such responsibility were a grave one. Rarely has unseemly strife or partisanship been manifest in the selection of associate judges, nor ever has a man notoriously unfit for the place been placed among them. But regarding the chief justiceship much zealous rivalry has been shown, much interest in the award of so rare and so consummate a public distinc tion. President Washington conferred the earliest honor of this kind upon a Revolu tionary patriot of talent and spotless integ rity; but John Jay had been bred to a career of politics and diplomacy, and the duties of the new position involved so little labor in his day that he found time to advise the chief Executive, almost as one of the cabinet, and to go as special envoy to England besides for arranging a treaty; and finally he re signed that splendid sinecure — for such he found it — to serve as governor of his native state in preference. In Oliver Ellsworth. President Washington raised another Revo lutionary statesman to the chief justiceship who served but a few brief years in that office, and, like Jay, made an embassy to Europe its crowning incident. The choice
