of Marshall was later modified, and on more than one occasion, as in the case of Worcester vs. Georgia, the Federal decrees were not enforced. To our day the boundary be tween State and Federal power has been obscure and vague. Since Marshall no man on the Court has so completely and convincingly cleared up questions of Federal authority as Hughes. Until he came to the bench the Court was uncertain and divided. The decisions were mixed and confusing. And then the mind of Hughes got hold of them. Now everybody breathes more freely except a few denizens of the twilight zone. They are in a panic.

And Justice Hughes's speech before the Bar Association in New York in January of this year is as extraordinary an expression of sound and far-reaching Nationalist doctrine as has ever been uttered. He speaks of the development of American law, and says that in recent years the tremendously increased exercise of Federal power under the commerce clause of the Constitution has not developed either partisan or any other serious opposition; that it reflects an increased National conviction of recent origin; and that the people, being disposed to exercise greater governmental control, are disposed to utilize freely whatever powers they find at their immediate command, caring little for divergencies from former political theory.

And my belief is that, if Justice Hughes's votes and opinions are studied from the time he entered the Court, it will be found that they are decisions and expositions of a free and unfettered Nationalism. Whether it be a case involving the rights of a railway corporation of labor, or of the foreign-born, it will be found that the spirit of a broad Americanism runs through it all. And the fundamental reason for it is that the physically weak and sickly boy who walked six miles every day through the streets of New York to and from his first job, with very little money in the family and nobody to take him by the hand, but who fought his way out of physical weakness into strength and through college, and through the preparation for the law and up through the Governorship of his State to the Supreme Court of his country, has had an experience which makes him feel the way the majority of the American people feel. And he is so permeated with the spirit of America, with its ideals and aspirations, that, when he thinks, his conclusion is such as will be approved by the great majority of his country

They cannot express it in opinions of

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the Supreme Court of the United States. With his wonderful mastery of English and of logical analysis he can express it.

And when the war is over, the great movement for democratic Nationalism at home and abroad is likely to go on more swiftly than before. And whose clear, sound mind shall be on guard in that final testing-ground of our institutions, the Supreme Court of the United States? It is no wonder that there are those who feel that to make Justice Hughes President would perhaps be in this crisis what it would have been to drag Marshall from his seat at the beginning of his career in the first great critical period of American history. It is not for any man to predict what the future may have in store for the first of this group of three great citizens of the Republic, but if, in the order of providence, Charles E. Hughes should become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of his country, there would be few to deny that a man with the possibilities of a second Marshall, with the instincts of a broad democratic Nationalism to which the first Marshall was necessarily a stranger, was sitting in the seat of the mighty.

I turn to the second of this extraordinary trio. When history sits down to recount the labors and the services of Elihu Root for the United States, she will be lost in admiration for the diversity of his resources and his powers. As the keenest thinker in his party organization, as a truly National Senator in Congress, as a remarkably efficient Secretary of War and a surpassingly able student and secretary of international affairs, he occupies already a place in public reflection conceded only to minds of the first rank. At the age of seventy he renounced the Senate and public position, and sought to become a sage and retire to the quiet of private life.

But the quiet of Elihu Root's private life is a curious thing to contemplate. The burdens of great private causes tend as naturally to gravitate to him and overwhelm him as ever public burdens did. He is the brain and soul of several of the great philanthropic Carnegie corporations. He is President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a powerful and working member of the Executive Committee of several of the Carnegie boards. The public has a misconception of Elihu Root as, first of all, a great corporation lawyer. As a matter of fact, his practice has been general and broad, and he is first of all, not a great corporation lawyer,