Here in Massachusetts you have had, I believe, a very unusually high
quality of service from your judges. [Applause.]
When I was President, one of the revolutionary things that I did, of
which you have heard so much, was, without any precedent――to put on the
Supreme Court of the Nation two judges from Massachusetts. [Applause.]
It was revolution; it had never been done before, but I should not
think that Massachusetts would attack me because of it. [Laughter and
applause.] I put on those two men――one of them Mr. Moody, my Attorney
General [applause], because I had become convinced from my association
with him that he not only knew law but knew life [applause], and that
he had a realization of the needs and of the ideals of the great
majority of his fellow citizens, the men and women who go to make up
the average of the citizenship of the United States.
I put on Mr. Holmes, then chief justice here [applause], because
studying his decisions I had grown to feel that he, too, sympathized
with the American people, and, what was even more important, realized
that the American people must decide for themselves, and not have
anyone else decide for them, what their ideas of fundamental justice,
as expressed in law, ought to be. [Applause.]