Instead of opposing the bill I ardently championed it.  It was a poorly drawn measure, and the Governor, Grover Cleveland, was at first doubtful about signing it.  The Cigar-makers’ Union then asked me to appear before the Governor and argue for it.  I accordingly did so, acting as spokesman for the battered, undersized foreigners who represented the Union and the workers.  The Governor signed the bill.  Afterwards this tenement-house cigar legislation was declared invalid by the Court of Appeals in the Jacobs decision.  Jacobs was one of the rare tenement-house manufacturers of cigars who occupied quite a suite of rooms, so that in his case the living conditions were altogether exceptional.  What the reason was which influenced those bringing the suit to select the exceptional instead of the average worker I do not know; of course such action was precisely the action which those most interested in having the law broken down were anxious to see taken.  The Court of Appeals declared the law unconstitutional, and in their decision the judges reprobated the law as an assault upon the “hallowed” influences of “home.”  It was this case which first waked me to a dim and partial understanding of the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.  The judges who rendered this decision were well-meaning men.  They knew nothing whatever of tenement-house conditions; they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities.  They knew legalism, but not life.  Their choice of the words “hallowed” and “home,” as applicable to the revolting conditions attending the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses, showed that they had no idea what it was that they were deciding.  Imagine the “hallowed” associations of a “home” consisting of one room where two families, one of them with a boarder, live, eat, and work!  This decision completely blocked tenement-house reform legislation in New York for a score of years, and hampers it to this day.  It was one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of industrial and social progress and reform ever received.

I had been brought up to hold the courts in especial reverence.  The people with whom I was most intimate were apt to praise the courts for just such decisions as this, and to speak of them as bulwarks against disorder and barriers against demagogic legislation.  These were the same people with whom the judges who rendered these decisions were apt to foregather at social clubs, or dinners, or in private life.  Very naturally they all tended to look at things from the same standpoint.  Of course it took more than one experience such as this Tenement Cigar Case to shake me out of the attitude in which I was brought up.  But various decisions, not only of the New York court but of certain other State courts and even of the United States Supreme Court, during the quarter