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.