We have now completed our programme for this afternoon. The annual address will be delivered this evening by the Honorable John W. Davis, of New York, former Member of Congress from West Virginia, Solicitor-General of the United States and Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The subject of the address will be "International Justice."

The Association will convene to-morrow morning at half past nine o'clock.

EVENING SESSION

NEW YORK, FRIDAY, January 20, 1922.

The Association met in the auditorium of the Hotel Astor for the purpose of listening to an address by Honorable George W. Davis, President William D. Guthrie presiding.

The President:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that the New York State Bar Association avails of this annual meeting, the forty-fifth in its history, to welcome to the New York Bar the Honorable John W. Davis. Mr. Davis has joined our ranks, and he has added his high reputation to the prestige of the New York Bar. The New York Bar in the past has been singularly fortunate in being so often enriched by the advent of the highest talent in the country, and this is but another example of our good fortune.

Mr. Davis is essentially the lawyer,-When he was in Congress he was recognized as one of the leading lawyers of the House of Representatives, and that was why he was practically the senior, although younger than the other managers, in one of the great impeachments before the High Court of the Senate of the United States. He then went into the office of Solicitor General of the United States, and I remember the first year that he was in that office hearing John G. Johnson, so long. one of the leaders of the American Bar, say that in his judgment the most promising member of the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States was John W. Davis, and the other day the ex-Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, Willard Bartlett, wrote me a letter expressing his regret that he could not be here. tonight to hear Mr. Davis, and adding, how several years ago

Mr. Root had told him (Judge Bartlett) that in his opinion among the coming leaders of the American Bar was John W. Davis.

The distinction that he won in the great office of SolicitorGeneral of the United States in arguing all the important cases which came before the Supreme Court of the United States during his term led to his choice as the most fitting that could be made at the time as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's He went there with the reputation of being a very scholarly lawyer and having rare literary talents; he won distinction abroad as a lawyer. His popularity there and his great success was as a great advocate, a legal scholar, and his success in various ways in aiding President Wilson in the difficult tasks that he had before him in Paris was as a lawyer. We are, therefore, immensely gratified to be able to welcome him tonight to the New York Bar. I have pleasure in presenting to you Mr. John W. Davis.

INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

There could be no better proof of the generosity of the legal profession in general and of the Bar of the State of New York in particular than the fact that at one and the same moment you admit a new-comer to the fellowship of your Association and to the privileges of your floor. I beg to assure you that I do not lack appreciation of this double honor. To enter one's name upon a roll that bears and has borne the names of so many who have led both their profession and the nation, and to speak from a platform which of itself gives distinction to its occupant, are honors indeed. In such circumstances to speak of duty seems lacking in graciousness, and yet the thought of reciprocal obligation is not wholly absent from my mind; for I cannot think that any American lawyer has fully met the rightful demands of his profession until he has made himself an active member of his local, State and national bar associations.

We are a scattered folk, we American lawyers. We issue from a multitude of law-schools after diversified courses of study and are admitted to the bars of our several jurisdictions under regulations as multiform as legislative ingenuity fortyeight times multiplied can devise. Each for himself becomes

speedily immersed in subjects that in their variety run the whole gamut of human experience and random discipline is administered to us by a legion of independent and disconnected tribunals. So far as I am aware, this situation is not paralleled among the lawyers of any other country. The sole tie which unites us is that in a common language we serve a common law and inherit from those who have gone before common traditions of loyalty, of service and of honor.

The duty to maintain and transmit these traditions unimpaired stands in the fore-front of those debts which every lawyer owes to his craft; and since it is a thing only to be performed effectively by concerted action it forms in and by itself a sufficient reason for the formation of bar associations and makes the call to membership in them imperative. Not only have the bar associations of the United States done a vital work in guarding the standards of professional training and conduct, but they offer the only avenue to solidarity, and in the last resolve the most effective means of inspiration and of discipline. The profession should not rest content until every lawyer worthy of the name is inscribed upon their rolls.

But grave as these things are, and great as is the service which a bar association can render to the law as a vocation, there are other functions even more exalted. The excelling call upon both law and lawyers must forever be the pursuit of justice and the advancement of jurisprudence, that justice which Justinian defines as "the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due ", and that jurisprudence which he describes as the knowledge of things divine and human, the science of the just and the unjust ". In the scales both of God and man we are to be weighed by our success or failure in this pursuit, and in this field, unlimited by any bounds save those of time and space, there is labor enough for us all.

It is the fashion to charge against lawyers that they are over fond of fixed rules and precedents, and too greatly immersed in the study of the past to give proper heed to present and future demands. But who better than the lawyer should know that jurisprudence, if it is to be the handmaid of justice, must be a living thing, growing, expanding and developing with the living things which it serves; that it must constantly adapt

itself to the changing modes and manners and ideas of men; and that while it need not forget the accumulated experience of the past, it must strive untiringly to clear the path for the oncoming future. I should like in what I have to say to you tonight to demonstrate that the American lawyer has not been insensible to these considerations; and that by a very notable contribution to the jurisprudence of his day he has set forward the coming of justice between both men and nations.

The incidents of which I wish to speak begin at the old City Hall in Philadelphia in the year 1793, when the case of Oswald, Administrator, vs. the State of New York, was called in the new-born Supreme Court of the United States. New York furnished both the scenario and the principal actors. The Chief Justice who presided was a New York lawyer, and the Marshal, Matthew Clarkson, is reputed to have been the only person in behalf of whose appointment to office John Jay ever interested himself. Upon the calling of the case, he was directed to proclaim that "any person having authority to appear for the State of New York is required to appear accordingly"; and when no one had come forward in response, it was ordered by the Court that "unless the State appears by the first day of the next Term to the above suit or show cause to the contrary, judgment will be entered by default against the State".

Who was Oswald, who was his decedent, what the claim against the State, and for what reason a different counsel appeared in his behalf each time that the case was noted by the Court these things as well as the terms of the settlement which removed it from the docket, are not entered in the volumes of the reports; but though the actors and their memories have long since passed away, the event in which the participated was nothing less than the first assertion by the newly established Court of its jurisdiction over the sovereign states of the Union, and its right to adjudicate against them. True, at a still earlier term, notice was taken of a suit by one Van Stophorst and others vs. the State of Maryland, in which the illustrious names of Luther Martin and Edmund Randolph appear as opposing counsel; but the voluntary discontinuance of this

case without costs to either party leaves to the Oswald case the distinction of being the first in which the power of the Court to render judgment in invitum was boldly avowed.

One wonders whether any of those who were present on that occasion sensed its significance or realized how great a force had entered the life of the nation.. Certainly Jay himself did not, or he could never have written eight years later that he "left the bench perfectly convinced that under a system so defective it would not obtain the energy, weight and dignity which were essential to its affording due support to the national government; nor acquire the public confidence and respect which as a last resort of the justice of the nation it should possess.

Perhaps it seemed to him and others a wholly natural occurrence. Judicial controversies to which states were parties were of course not new in history or unknown in America. Classical scholars as were so many of the men of that day, they had read of Greece and her Amphictyonic Councils, and knew that under the Holy Roman Empire the Imperial Chamber and the Aulic Council had quarreled down the centuries over their respective jurisdictions. Disputes between the colonies had been more than once submitted to the King sitting in council (Colony of Rhode Island vs. Colony of Connecticut, 1727; Colony of Rhode Island vs. Colony of Massachusetts, - 1746); and some which existed in 1776 were still in being when the Constitution itself was adopted. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress as the last resort on appeal "in all disputes and differences now subsisting or that hereafter may arise between two or more states concerning boundary, jurisdiction or any other cause whatever", had proceeded to set up its Court of Commissioners and to adjudicate between disputant states. State of Pennsylvania vs. State of Connecticut,-1782,-131 U. S. App.) In the Convention itself, the judicial power had been extended without serious debate to such controversies, and Hamilton in the Federalist (LXXX) dismisses the subject with little more than a paragraph and the conclusion that "whatever practices may have a tendency to disturb the harmony between the States, are proper subjects of federal superintendence and control". But we who stand at greater distance and can ob