The appeal to venerated principle we have considered already, looked at
from the side of morals rather than of emotions. But morality, so far as
it is a coercive force in human conduct, is emotional; our moral
standards lie beyond and above reason in that larger part of our nature
that knows through feeling and intuition. All men have certain standards
and principles whose names arouse strong and reverent emotions. Such
standards are not all religious or moral in the stricter sense; some of
them have their roots in systems of government. In a case at law, argued
purely on a question of law, there does not seem much chance for the
appeal to feeling; but Mr. Joseph H. Choate, in his argument on the
constitutionality of the Income Tax of 1894, before the Supreme Court
of the United States, made the following appeal to the principle of the
sanctity of private property, and the words he used could not have
failed to stir deep and strong feelings in the court.
No longer ago, if the Court please, than the day of the funeral
procession of General Sherman in New York, it was my fortune to spend
many hours with one of the ex-Presidents of the United States, who has
since followed that great warrior to the bourne to which we were then
bearing him.
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