In this moral infection, the work of Hannis Taylor played an important part. He wrote legal opinions for the Council, declaring that the traffic in munitions was unconstitutional. He received $700 for this work. These opinions were printed and distributed broadcast, and did much harm. More recently, Taylor was counsel for Robert Cox, the Missouri draft registrant who sued to restrain General Leonard Wood from sending him with his regiment to France. On his behalf, Hannis Taylor contended that the Conscription Act was unconstitutional, asserting that the only power of Congress to call out troops was under the militia clause of the Constitution which reads: “To execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” This meant, so Taylor contended, that no citizen could be sent, against his will, outside the United States to fight its battles. This absurd doctrine, which would force us to fight this war on our own soil instead of allowing us to defend ourselves in Europe against German aggression, was promptly punctured by the Supreme Court of the United States. In his brief before that Court Hannis Taylor used language so violent that the counsel for the Government asked that it be expunged from the record. Taylor in his brief accused the President of being a “dictator,” of seizing powers “in open defiance of the judgments” of the Supreme Court, and of demanding “such an aggregation of powers as no monarch ever wielded in any constitutional government that ever existed.” The decision of the Supreme Court, affirming the Government’s right to draft its citizens for service overseas, was delivered by Chief Justice White. That stern old veteran of the Lost Cause in our Civil War, speaking with the aloofness and dignity of that august Court, in measured terms expressed an opinion of Mr. Hannis Taylor that is worth repeating. He said: