The prediction of the great publicist, made so many years ago, as to the next great war, has come true. The intervening wars have been trifling by comparison and marked by no material increase in severity, but the present war has passed all the bounds of precedent and even of imagination. Let us hope that the prophecy as to the modification of the laws of war after the present conflict is ended will be as measurably fulfilled. The invention and application of death-dealing machinery and chemicals may even give the prophecy a larger fulfillment by the abolition of war altogether. For this we humbly hope and pray. THE ADMINISTRATION FORCE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE HON. FRED DENNETT A court is created for the purpose of administering justice, under law. “This then is the general significance of law, a rule of action dictated by some superior being.” And then the great teacher of the English Common law lays down the principles of the moral law “that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due”; and of the law of nature “that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness,” adding, “that this is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law; for the several articles into which it is branched in our systems amount to no more than demonstrating that this or that action tends to man’s real happiness, and therefore very justly concluding that the performance of it is a part of the law of nature or, on the other hand, that this or that action is destructive of man’s happiness, and therefore that the law of nature forbids it.” From these two prior laws he derives the “third kind of law to regulate this mutual intercourse, called the ‘law of nations,’ which, cannot be dictated by any, but depends entirely upon the rules of natural law, or upon mutual compacts, treaties, leagues, and agreements between these several communities: in the construction also of which compacts we have no other rules to resort to, but the law of nature: being the only one to which all the communities are equally subject.” The “natural law” is no longer the controlling “law.” That which most promptly suggests itself to the mind of the ordinary man, when law is talked of, is not the moral law or the natural law, but municipal law, “a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong.”