advice, and assistance in preparing all papers that such registrant is required to submit in the process of the selection of citizens of this nation for duty in the present emergency."

And again (Sec. 46):

"All lawyers and physicians should regard it as their duty to identify themselves with the Advisory Boards provided for in Sections 44 and 45 and freely and without compensation to give their best service to the Nation. It is inconsistent with this duty for lawyers to seek clients for the purpose of urging and advocating individual cases in any other way than as disinterested and impartial assistants of the Selective Service system."

This Committee is of course in the most thorough accord with the principles of these Regulations, parts of which have been quoted herein.

The President:

The next business is the Report of the Committee on International Arbitration.

Everett P. Wheeler, of New York:

Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Association: I will not read our report. It gives a sketch of the work in which your Committee, with the full approval of the Association expressed at three successive meetings, has been engaged. ́

In endeavoring to create a public sentiment in favor of a more complete and adequate provision for international arbitration with a sanction, we have met with more approval than has ever before been expressed. Some of you will remember that our first resolution on that subject was extensively debated at Buffalo three years ago, and after full debate our resolution was approved. The world has

certainly made progress since then, In some respects I am afraid it has been progress backwards, but great changes have taken place during these years, and it is satisfactory to your Committee, and it will be to your Association, to realize that the plan we then recommended, and which has been developed in our subsequent reports, has been taken up by many other bodies, notably by the League to Enforce Peace. We quote in our report the official statement of the object of that League, of which, you will remember, President Taft is the President. Without reading this in detail, I call attention to the fact that it does embody the main propositions which we recommended. One was that there should be an international court with authority to hear and decide controversies arising between members of the League, and in the next place that there should be an international police standing behind that court to enforce its decisions.

Now, just how far that should go there has not yet been any agreement among those that have considered the subject, but they have got thus far, without any exception, that no nation should be permitted to violate a treaty, or to engage in hostilities, on any ground, with another nation, until the dispute shall have been submitted to arbitration. It seems to be a matter of universal agreement among leading men of the various nations engaged in this present world war that that would be a wise provision when the war is over to be agreed to by all the nations. Some of them have called attention to the significant fact that there is now a League of nations, Great Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Italy, making common cause to defend the sanctity of treaty, the sacredness of individual nations from aggression. They are spending their blood and their treasure without stint in defense of that funda

mental purpose of international duty and international law. The relations which have been created in this way by our mutual association and co-operation cannot vanish when the immediate occasion for them has passed. The world relations have changed, and most notably the relations of the United States of America to the other nations of the world have changed.

The Committee quote at length, in the appendix to the report, various declarations by great statesmen and important public bodies on this subject, to which I will just call your attention. We quote first the President of the United States on various occasions, Lloyd George, the Premier of Great Britain, Mr. Asquith, his predecessor, from the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Balfour, from Viscount Gray, Lord Curzon, Arthur Henderson, who represents, in the British Cabinet, the Labor Party, as it is called, from the old adversary and present supporter of the British government, General Smuts, of South Africa, Lord Northcliffe, Premier Ribot of France, Monsieur Viviani, and officia! declarations, not only from our own government, but from the governments of the Entente Allies, Great Britain and France, as well as Switzerland and Spain. We also refer to the declarations of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States.

Now, it is an extraordinary thing, it is unprecedented in international history that these varied nations, through their official representatives, have been brought by the pressure of circumstances and the logic of events, to this substantial unanimity.

Since this report was drafted and printed we have two very interesting restatements, shall I say, one from the President of the United States no longer ago than last Tuesday, the 8th of January, in his address to Congress,

which, I might say, I had the pleasure of listening to. I was in Washington at that time. I must say that the practice which the President has adopted of meeting Congress face to face and addressing them is one that I think his successors should follow. It was, as you know, adopted by Washington and by Adams, and since then has been in disuse; but no man who has witnessed the Senate coming into the House of Representatives, and the assembling of the members of both Houses, the fixed attention that is paid to the deliverances of the President, can fail to realize that in that way a method has been found of bringing the two branches of the government into closer understanding and co-operation, which is of great public interest, and of great public importance.

This is the particular clause that I want to read. The fourteenth condition which the President lays down as an indispensable condition of permanent peace is:

"A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants, for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity of great and small States alike."

Now, you perceive how comprehensive that is. There are to be specific covenants. We have had covenants before, treaties have been described by the aggressor in this war as "a scrap of paper," but the President and these' statesmen of other nations, appreciate as clearly as we do, that there must be, in addition to specific covenants, mutual guarantees.

Now, a mutual guarantee may be by economic pressure, which we might describe as an international boycott, or by the pressure of armed force, an international police. It may be either, it might conceivably be both.

That proposition of the President has been received with absolute unanimity by the Entente Allies. Moreover, whatever our feelings may have been in the past, we must admit that the great labor unions of England and this country are factors to be reckoned with in any future political activities. It is therefore with satisfaction that we find that Mr. Arthur Henderson, who is the leader of the Labor Party in the House of Commons, declared on the 5th of January in favor of the establishment on a firm basis of a league of nations and peoples for disarmament, and the prevention of future wars. These things, Mr. Henderson states, constitute an irreducible minimum.

When we offered our report in Buffalo three years ago the objection was made to it that we were theorists, that these were dreams which might perhaps in a century I remember one of my friends who opposed our resolution then used that very expression; he said, “A century from now these plans of yours may be realized "--- but now we find that very important and influential organizations and statesmen, the President of the United States, declare for these things. Mr. Henderson states that they constitute an irreducible minimum. Certainly the development of public sentiment on this subject within these three years is remarkable.

I find in a bulletin issued by the League to Enforce Peace, which has just been laid on my table, that the French Foreign Minister has declared that among other objects for which the French people are engaged in this war, he deems as an essential condition of peace a guarantee of durable peace by international arrangement. When he was asked to explain this last phrase, which I see the League has printed in capitals, he says it refers to a