The Late Justice Brewer
By Editor
We are glad that there are some voices that can speak out their honest convictions altho they may not be popular. The late Justice Brewer has been very highly lauded all over the land since his death, but The California Weekly, in a little note, says: “Let the truth be told. He was a kindly man and a good, but was not great, and he watched his political p's and q's all his life as carefully as any politician in the state whence he came. Brewer's path to eminence was not differently blazed from that of most other jurists of his time; and if, in his utterances and decisions, he held the rights of property superior to the rights of man, it was because it was in that school that he was nurtured and through that influence that he was advanced. Yet he would not consciously have reasoned to a false conclusion. He merely leaned as a judge as he was inclined as a twig of the law.” This, it seems to us, is a fair estimate of the character of Justice Brewer, as was well shown in his religious predilections. He is the author of the famous—it ought to be infamous—Trinity Church decision of Feb. 29, 1892. Against the decision itself we have nothing to say; but against the course of reasoning on the religious side of the question, which led to that decision, we know of no document which has ever issued from the courts that is more out of harmony with the rights of man than that. Sometimes that decision has been called “The Christian Nation Decision.” As such it is used by National Reformers at the present time. Judge Brewer “found” that all the various charters granted by rulers of medieval times, Catholic, Protestant, Puritan, Episcopalian, all the various church and state remnants which were brought over the sea into the colonies, went to prove that this is a Christian nation, and as a Christian nation Christian institutions of course ought to be regarded, and among the Christian institutions are the Sunday laws. A truly great mind, in weighing all the various religious documents which Justice Brewer reviewed, would have seen the inevitable conflict which grew out of the crystallizing religious opinion in civil law. He would have seen that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, as well as the utterances of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others, constituted a square break from medieval times; and he would have decided that this Government was not a Christian nation, but a nation for men, for all men, in which there could be, so far as men's laws are concerned, absolute freedom for all sects and beliefs. But Judge Brewer followed his early teachings not alone in this utterance, but in other utterances he showed the same tendency and weakness. It will be ill for the country indeed if his decisions are taken as interpretations of fundamental law.