In Quest of Freedom: American Political Thought and Practice

LIBERAL THOUGHT AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY WAS moving steadily toward a broad program of social action in opposition to the laissez-faire concepts implicit in the Gilded Age's Gospel of Wealth and supported by a considerable segment of the American people. Against these concepts, reformist ideas had scored notable successes at the polls and in legislative halls. A stable majority of converts had, however, still to be won on the United States Supreme Court. Sharing the Court's views were leading lawyers and a significant number of judges on other courts, who echoed Arthur Twining Hadley, sometime Railroad Commissioner of Connecticut, professor of political economy and first lay president of Yale:

However much public feeling may at times move in the direction of socialistic measures, there is no nation which by its constitution

-410-