JUDICIARY: A Little Finishing Canter

In his quiet study in his old-fashioned red brick house on Washington's I ("Eye") Street one evening last week sat a white-haired gentleman enjoying a nation-wide birthday party. Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the U. S. Supreme Court was 90 in years, in spirit 30. Over the radio great men led by Chief Justice Hughes praised this famed son of a famed father as few living men are praised. They reviewed his long career—thrice-wounded Union soldier, Harvard scholar, Massachusetts judge, senior jurist of the nation's highest court, liberal dissenter from conservative majorities. Said Dean Charles Edward Clark of Yale's law school: "So often has he been ahead of his generation in scholarship as well as opinion that we may well hesitate to differ with him for fear he but expresses the views we will hold tomorrow."

When the salutes were over Mr. Justice Holmes edged his wide white mustache closer to the microphone on his study desk and in his soft, old-gentleman's voice spoke as follows:

"In this symposium my part is only to sit in silence. To express one's feelings as the end draws near is too intimate a task.

"But I may mention one thought that comes to me as a listener-in. The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: 'The work is done.'

"But just as one says that, the answer comes: 'The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.'

"The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.

"And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago:

" 'Death plucks my ears and says, 'Live —I am coming.' "