We got through another, which stood the test of the courts.
The principle to which we especially strove to give expression, through these laws and through executive action, was that a right is valueless unless reduced from the abstract to the concrete.

This sounds like a truism.

So far from being such, the effort practically to apply it was almost revolutionary, and gave rise to the bitterest denunciation of us by all the big lawyers, and all the big newspaper editors, who, whether sincerely or for hire, gave expression to the views of the privileged classes.

Ever since the Civil War very many of the decisions of the courts, not as regards ordinary actions between man and man, but as regards the application of great governmental policies for social and industrial justice, had been in reality nothing but ingenious justification of the theory that these policies were mere high-sounding abstractions, and were not to be given practical effect.

The tendency of the courts had been, in the majority of cases, jealously to exert their great power in protecting those who least needed protection and hardly to use their power at all in the interest of those who most needed protection.