source, and nothing is more commonly reflected upon with pride by English lawyers than that the constitutions of all your States, but two, contain a reservation to the effect that where no other law applies, the doctrine and the conclusions of the English common law shall determine controversies within their confines. Gentlemen, in my own experience, I might perhaps cite a further illustration: It has been my fortune, as principal law adviser of the British Government in the last three years, to argue many cases in our Prize Courts. In the earliest stages of those arguments, I was conscious of some embarrassment if and when I reflected upon the view which was held of them by American lawyers; but I assure you, if I may say so to my Brethren of the Bar of the State of New York, that no authorities were more frequently cited by me before the President of our Prize Court, Sir Samuel Evans, and before the Privy Council, which is our Appellate Court on prize matters, than those decisions of your great American judges which are contained in the reports of Wallace and Cranch. I am sure that American lawyers would have been proud if they could have observed, as I have done, the respect which is daily paid in the highest courts in our country to the judgments of the distinguished judges whose decisions are recorded in those historical reports.

Mr. President, at first sight superficial persons may be tempted to the conclusion that this is not a war which very mach concerns lawyers. I take a different view. I think it is a war, of all the wars that have ever been waged, that concerns lawyers more than any other war, and which is certainly more directly and more demonstrably related to legal problems than any of the great wars of the world.

I have chosen to-night a wide subject, one which enables me, with your kind indulgence, to touch, with superficial

treatment, upon a wide variety of subjects. The topic of the address to which you are good enough to listen to-night is, "Law, War and the Future." I and those who listen to me are supposed to be learned in the law. In the language of Horace, we are legum jurisque periti, but, with the skill, of our science, we have, I believe, fastened upon the laymen of this country and our own a higher degree of responsibility than we have ever accepted in our own case, because every layman in our country, and I suspect every layman in this country, is bound, at his peril to understand the law; but as I understand your law and ours, we lawyers can only be called upon for a reasonable understanding of the law. Most of us are busy practitioners in the law, we can give advice to people who find themselves in difficulties in the affairs of daily life. I suspect that in the stress of practice we may forget those far-away student days, when we brooded under compulsion over the philosophical but somewhat arid volumes of Austin. I doubt whether there is a practitioner at the Bar listening to me to-day who, in his younger days, was not compelled, or, at any rate, exhorted, to study the volumes of this Apostle of Analysis.

Well, sir, I hope that you have maintained in its unimpaired integrity the fresh and fragrant impressions which I, and no doubt you, in youth derived from those volumes. I am about to ask you (making a great strain upon your friendly indulgence) to recall what has been the conception of law, not as we conceive of it in our daily practice, but as it was analysed for us in our youth by the great writers who have become classical names in the history of jurisprudence.

I suppose that, in its proper sense, law is adequately defined as an instruction or a prohibition, issuing from an organized and sovereign society to persons within the juris-, diction, and fortified by an appropriate sanction. There are

many uses of the term "law" which are analogous or purely metaphorical, which writers who have dwelt upon the inevitableness of law upon the familiar experience that when the law issues certain injunctions or prescriptions certain consequences follow - have invented by way of metaphor. Instances of such metaphorical use can be found in the phrases: "The law of gravity," or "the law of refraction." A well-known writer has pointed out how merely metaphorical such terms are in relation to the severe and proper conception of the term law. When you say there is a law of gravity or a law of refraction, all you mean is that under certain physical conditions objects are refracted or objects do gravitate. But, sir, these uses of the term "law" are of very small importance in relation to the use of the term "law" which a lawyer, addressing lawyers, is bound to make.. I am chiefly concerned to-night, attempting as I am to develop the conception of law in its relation to the great world crisis in which we find ourselves, to lay stress upon the coercive element in the conception of law, the sanction which visits with punitive consequences the citizen who is in breach of the law.

Sir, in our domestic law, the power of punishing the man who is in breach of the law is essential to the very conception of law. No state is civilized which has not, in the first place, this conception of law, and which does not, in the second, associate in its execution the consequence, that any man who breaks the law suffers; he is punished; he is involved in punitive consequences; and if you ask an educated citizen which of all the elements in law is the most characteristic, he will undoubtedly reply to you that it is to be found in the fact that the man who disobeys the law sustains punishment at the hands of Society. I merely restate this commonplacé and familiar doctrine because I invite you next, by way of contrast, to consider the con