of its own conservation." The free play of his compact and incisive reasoning touched many topics-copyright law, the patient examination of the tribal records on which rest titles of the lands of Indian wards, bankruptcy and commercial law, the simplification of procedure, taxation, the franchises and rates of public service corporations, and many others-but his great and memorable service was in re-definition and application of the boundaries of State and National authority, and in welding together anew the economic and political elements of a dominant Nationalism.

It could with propriety be said of him, as it was said of John Marshall by Mr. Bryce, that

He grasped with extraordinary force and clearness the cardinal idea that the creation of a National government implies the grant of all such subsidiary powers as are requisite to the effectuation of its main powers and purposes, but he developed and applied this idea with so much prudence and sobriety, never treading on purely political ground, never indulging in the temptation to theorise, but content to follow out as a lawyer the consequences of legal principles, that the Constitution seemed not so much to rise under his hands to its full stature, as to be gradually unveiled by him until it stood revealed in the harmonious perfection of the form which its framers had designed.

Justice Hughes vindicated afresh the adequacy and practicability of the Constitutional

concepts of the boundaries of State and National action; he established in concrete fashion the effectiveness of the historic concepts of control; he answered acceptably a challenge which the complexity of new transportation and industrial problems seemed for a time to make to the Federal system.

He was "a team-work judge," not an unreasoning adherent of individual opinion. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about his work, under all the conditions of the National life of the past five years, is that it does not, and was not made to, stand out in any way from the trend of policy and decision of the Court as a whole. This record of his opinions and utterances is almost equally a record of the opinions and utterances of the Court as a whole. If he was progressive and forwardlooking, so were his colleagues. The great issues brought before the Court were threshed out in its conferences, and thereby was developed a patriotic unity and agreement of view which has fortified both the Court and the Constitution in public confidence. There may be understanding of what Justice Hughes meant, in saying before the New York County Lawyers' Association in 1911, that

In the conferences of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, there is exhibited a candour, a comprehensiveness, a sincerity, and a complete devotion to their task, that I am sure would be most gratifying to the

entire people of the Union, could they know more intimately what actually takes place.

And we may understand what former Justice John Archibald Campbell meant in saying, in the course of that intimate description of the work and conferences of the Court which is to be found in his remarks at the exercises in commemoration of Justice Benjamin R. Curtis in 1874, as reported in the twentieth volume of Wallace's Reports, that of all the enumerated duties performed by a Justice of the Supreme Court, "the most arduous and responsible duty is in the conference."

In a tale adapted from the Talmud, there is a comparison which may be used to characterise the manner and spirit of approach to public questions which seems to stand out through the judicial service of Charles E. Hughes. Mastery of law and its development and application are there likened to a great heap of dirt that needs to be cleared away:

The foolish man says: "It is impossible that I should be able to remove this immense heap. I will not attempt anything so impossible. I will ignore it, and pass it by, and say there is no such obstacle." But the wise man says: "I see it. It is there. It has to be dealt with. I will remove a little to-day, some more to-morrow, and more the day after, and thus in time I shall have removed it all; and the fathers will be glad."

CHAPTER II

NATIONAL POWER OVER NATIONAL INTERESTS

THE monumental and distinctive service rendered by Mr. Hughes in the Supreme Court was in the so-called "State Rate Cases"-an epochal series of controversies which came up from the commonwealths of the Mississippi Valley and South-west and subjected our dual system of State and National sovereignty to the most severe strain and test since the Civil War. To him there was entrusted, not only the prodigious labours of the perusal of an unprecedented quantity of printed records and exhaustive briefs, incident to the examination of the intricate questions of valuation, rates, returns, fixed charges, depreciation, repairs, intangible and physical property, franchises, and the like, on which largely depended the determination of the reasonableness or confiscatory character of hundreds of orders of State Commissions affecting thousands of rates over diverse arcas, but also the preparation of opinions which necessarily undertook the task of making concrete, understandable, workable, and consistent, the practical applications of the general principles of State and National authority,

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hitherto stated in the most general terms in the Federal Constitution and expounded in terminology hardly less general, by Marshall and his successors in the constructive statesmanship of the Supreme Court of an earlier day.

There was doubt on the part of many whether it was physically possible that a court, before which issues of great difficulty and public importance were coming day by day, without end and almost without interlude, could in addition perform, in any adequate and acceptable fashion, the task of scrutiny and review of such voluminous records, calling, as each case did, for detailed examination of facts as to the relative adjustments of rates, the income from different classes of traffic, the cost of transportation of the various classes of traffic, and the whole issue of the reasonableness of the returns from the rates as fixed by State authority. As one saw wagon-loads of exhibits brought into hearings before the State Commissions and the Interstate Commerce Commission; as one looked upon the bulky volumes of testimony and formidable libraries of briefs prepared with laborious effort by little armies of specialised counsel; as one saw maps and tariffs piled before special masters and listered to the droning narrative of rate-experts and tariff-men as to the way in which schedules have been built up through the years and the factors necessarily taken into account in even a single community, to say nothing of a State or region,

it seemed to many that the decisive challenge to National regulation had come, and that the whole fabric was imperilled by the physical impossibility that a busy court could perform with thoroughness and fidelity to fundamental principles the recurring task of keeping the rivalries of States and sections within the confines of the fair rights of invested property and the paramount interests of the Nation as a whole.

Such was the challenge to National regulation of essentially National concerns-should that National control in the National sphere be affirmed, clarified, made effective, or was it now to break down, virtually under the weight and complexity of the demand made upon the Supreme Court? Mr. Hughes was the youngest member of the Court; he had an infinite capacity for patient and assiduous application to facts; he had come from the atmosphere of rate and regulative matters in New York State; upon him devolved no small part of the detail work in the rate cases. The statement may with entire accuracy be made that few men of mature years and ripened experience could have physically performed the task mastered by Justice Hughes between the close of the argument in the Minnesota Rate Cases 1 on April 12, 1912, and the handing down of the remarkable series of opinions which began with the determination of the Minnesota cases on June 9, 1913. His 1230 U. S. Reports, page 352.