OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Twenty-five years ago Oliver Wendell Holmes '61 took his place on the Supreme Bench of the United States, in that room of the Capital which had been the meeting place of Congress during a century of wery kind of ordeal. It is not merely that Justice. Holmes has given twenty-five years of his life to the support of the national integrity to which he was heir, nor yet that no man before him ever served in the Supreme Court at such an advanced age. This is a man who has seen the law not in terms a didactic decisions, but as the ancient instrument of justice, an instrument not unadaptable to the meeting of present and coming needs. At a time when too much insistence on the letter of local law has resulted in a national growth of contraditory decrees, the remedy may lie in fresh application of the old principle.

Harvard may well extend its felicitations for the man who forty years ago, as a Judge of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, spoke out his allegiance to the old law with these words: "When I think of the law I see a princess mightier than she who once wrought at Bayeux eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever lengthening pas;--figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by while mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life."