THE HAUNTED HOUSE

As a consolation prize Justice Stone's dissenting opinion in the A.A.A. case is being hailed by New Dealers as a heroic statement of the liberal creed and a judicial vindication of their ill starred policies. But upon close examination the opinion is neither heroic nor Judicial, and from the first paragraph on expresses a fear and trembling one hardly expects to hear from the Supreme Court. Justice Stone appears far less worried about the constitutionality of the A.A.A. than he is about some imagined danger of the conservative wing of the court rocking the boat amid the troubled waters of modern politics.

The opinion makes the primary point of warning the court that it is concerned "Only with the power to enact statutes, not with their wisdom," and, what is as arrogant as it is redundant, that the justices must never fail to exercise self-restraint. It is hard to believe that Justice Stone's colleagues on the bench either deserve or need such a sermon. At no point in the majority opinion does the court lose the strict objectivity it has heretofore maintained. In this case Justice Stone is not addressing a frost-bitten or anti-social cabal. The decision is that of Hughes and Roberts as well as McReynolds and Van Devanter, and the charge that implacable reactionaries have blocked the road to progress cannot be made under these circumstances.

What is this dagger Justice Stone sees before him? There is certainly no resentment against the Supreme Court in the country today. Can the screechings of one or two stormy petrels in the halls of Congress frighten the secure justices of the highest court of the land? Considering the attitude of the country last May when the court voided the N.R.A. there is no possibility that public opinion will now suddenly and vindictively rise up against it. Nor has the prestige of the tribunal diminished in any degree since that time.

One might believe that Justice Stone does not feel quite up to the magnificence of his new surroundings. It would be irony indeed if the United States spent millions of dollars on a marble palace only to have even one Supreme Court Justice feel dwarfed and impotent in it. Or perhaps Justice Stone, chafing at the oblivion of a minority opinion, has purposely prepared a bitter brew for his colleagues. At any rate he has caused a ghost to stalk through the pillared halls of the Supreme Court, but it is hoped that the phantom will haunt no one but Justice Stone himself.