ABSTRACT
The social and intellectual world into which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born was one which had cramped many of his contemporaries. Karl Llewellyn has remarked that Holmes should have been born an Adams. In Holmes's life there is a wholeness which the New England aristocracy at its best produced. Young Holmes was thus held secure in a haven of social orthodoxy without being wholly shut off from the tumult of innovation. Holmes came back to the fighting in November 1862, only to be stricken with an undignified attack of dysentery. Holmes relied ultimately on the strength of the American tradition, the self-balancing tendencies within social experiment and the competition of ideas, and the inner cogency of the qualities which he loosely called "race." Holmes acted from the image of a philosophic universe. And because he had so firm a nucleus of conviction, he was unperturbed by Roosevelt's lashings and his concentrated fury.
