looking inside our municipal law and seeing whether the judgments of
the law are made square with the moral judgments of mankind. For I
believe that we are custodians of the spirit of righteousness, of the
spirit of equal handed justice, of the spirit of hope which believes in
the perfectibility of the law with the perfectibility of human life
itself.

"Public life, like private life, would be very dull and dry if it were
not for this belief in the essential beauty of the human spirit and the
belief that the human spirit should be translated into action and into
ordinance. Not entire. You cannot go any faster than you can advance
the average moral judgment of the mass, but you can go at least as fast
as that, and you can see to it that you do not lag behind the average
moral judgments of the mass. I have in my life dealt with all sorts
and conditions of men, and I have found that the flame of moral
judgment burns just as bright in the man of humble life and limited
experience as in the scholar and man of affairs. And I would like his
voice always to be heard, not as a witness, not as speaking in his own
case, but as if he were the voice of men in general, in our courts of
justice, as well as the voice of the lawyers, remembering what the law
has been. My hope is that, being stirred to the depths by the
extraordinary circumstances of the time in which we live, we may
recover from those steps something of a renewal of that vision of the
law with which men may be supposed to have started out in the old days
of the oracles, who commune with the intimations of divinity."

Before this war, very few nations paid any attention to public opinion.
France was probably the beginner. Some twenty years before 1914,
France began to extend her civilisation to Russia, Italy, the Balkans
and Syria. In Roumania, today, one hears almost as much French as