worrying, for he knew the work had been carried far enough to complete itself. When someone asked him to take part in some little controversy shortly before the collapse, he replied, “That fight does not need me any longer. Time and arithmetic will do the rest.”
This grasp of the concrete is combined in Mr. Brandeis with an equally distinguished grasp of bearing and significance. His imagination is as notable as his understanding of business. In those accomplishments which have given him his place in American life, the two sides of his mind have worked together. The arrangement between the Gas Company and the City of Boston rests on one of the guiding principles of Mr. Brandeis’s life, that no contract is good that is not advantageous to both parties to it. Behind his understanding of the methods of obtaining insurance and the proper cost of it to the laboring man lay a philosophy of the vast advantage to the fibre and energy of the community that would come from devising methods by which the laboring classes could make themselves comfortable through their whole lives and thus perhaps making unnecessary elaborate systems of state help. The most important ideas put forth in the Armstrong Committee Report on insurance had been previously suggested by Mr. Brandeis, acting as counsel for the Equitable policy holders. Business and the more important statesmanship were intimately combined in the management of the Protocol in New York, which has done so much to improve conditions in the clothing industry. The welfare of the laborer and his relation to his employer seems to Mr. Brandeis, as it does to all the most competent thinkers today, to constitute the most important question we have to solve, and he won the case, coming up to the Supreme Court of the United States, from Oregon, establishing the constitutionality of special protective legislation for women. In the Minimum Wage case, also from the State of Oregon, which is about to be heard before the Supreme Court, he takes up what is really a logical sequence of the limitation of women’s hours in certain industries, since it would be a futile performance to limit their hours and then allow their wages to be