The eloquent addresses not only stirred the enthusiasm of the great audiences, but men of statesmanlike minds were looking forward to practical definite results. Before the World Court Congress adjourned steps were taken to make the Committee of One Hundred a permanent body, and so to organize public opinion, with the aid of other associations, of legislative bodies, and of the press, that it will prove of distinct assistance to the administration at Washington, which has seemed ready at any fitting moment to support the movement practically. UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT THE PROTOTYPE OF A WORLD COURT BY HON. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT Institutional advances in the progress of the world are rarely made abruptly. They are not like Minerva, who sprang full-armed from the brain of Jove. If they are to have the useful feature of permanence they must be a growth so that the communities whose welfare they affect may grow accustomed to them as natural and so accept them. Our so-called Anglo-Saxon civil liberty with its guaranties of the Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act and the Independence of the Judiciary, constituting the unwritten British Constitution, made our American people familiar with a body of moral restraints upon executive and legislative action to secure the liberty of the individual. The written limitations upon Colonial legislative action in Colonial charters granted by the Crown and their enforcement by the Privy Council of England probably suggested to the framers of our Federal Constitution that the principles of British Constitutional liberty be given written form and be committed to a Supreme and Independent Court to enforce them as against the Executive and Congress, its coördinate branches in the Government. The step, epochal as it was, from judicially enforcing such limitations against a subordinate Legislature under a written charter of its powers, to a judicial enforcement of the limitations imposed by the sovereign people on the Legislature and Executive that they the people had created in the same instrument, was not radical but seemed naturally to follow. The revolted Colonies after the Revolution, though united by a common situation and a common cause in their struggle with Great Britain, and acting together through the Continental Congress in a loose and voluntary alliance, were sovereigns independent of each other. The Articles of Confederation, which declared their union to be permanent, were not agreed to and ratified in such a way as to be binding until some five years after the Declaration of Independence. Meantime it had become increasingly evident that, strong as were their common interests, they had divergent ones, too, which might embarrass their kindly relations. The leagues of Greece had furnished an example of confederations of small States, forced together by a common oppressor and foe, which had