TO ESTABLISH A WORLD COURT
But, gentlemen, this Congress stands for a bigger thing than the rules of war—it stands for the rules of peace. It represents a serious endeavor to establish a World Court that shall ultimately bring about the end of war. The thing that has struck me in this Congress from the opening day is its upright downright seriousness. It is essentially a Congress of ways and means. The desirability of peace, the absolute necessity of peace in a world that claims to be civilized is taken for granted—no one discusses it. What everyone is discussing instead is a sane, wise plan of securing peace. Ex-President Taft in his unusually able state-paper has proposed a plan for a World Court; Judge Parker has endorsed it in his address; a great banker like Emerson McMillan has outlined a plan by which the members of such a Court can be chosen; William Dudley Foulke in his scholarly paper last night proposed a plan of orderly progress for a League of the Nations, following the analogy of our own Confederation and our own Constitution; and James Brown Scott, in the able address we have just heard this morning, has pointed out the present status of the Hague Tribunal and shown how we can go forward from the point of great accomplishment that the world has already reached.