At the outset, it is pertinent to recall the high hopes with which, ten years ago, the Washington Conference Treaties were proclaimed to the world. We can still remember the measured words with which President Harding brought the Conference to a close. “This Conference,” he declared, “has wrought a truly great achievement. It is hazardous sometimes to speak in superlatives, and I will be restrained. But I will say with every confidence that the faith plighted here today, kept in national honor, will mark the beginning of a new and better epoch in human progress.”

The grounds for these high hopes were set forth in the official summary transmitted to the Senate along with the record of the proceedings of the Conference and the texts of the treaties themselves:

To estimate correctly the character and value of these several treaties [it is written in this document] they should be considered as a whole. Each one contributes its part in combination with the others towards the establishment of conditions in which peaceful security will take the place of competitive preparation for war. … Competitive armament, however, is the result of a state of mind in which a national expectation of attack by some other country causes preparation to meet the attack.

The term “majority rule” is as impossible to escape as it is apparently difficult to define with precision. Aristotle generally employed it to designate the conduct of government by the poor citizens, who were more numerous than the rich, in the Greek city states. In canon law, it meant the verdict of the maior and sanior pars of a small group. Frederic Harrison wrote about the “rule” of the “effective majority”—that section of any community or social aggregate, which, for the matter in hand, practically outweighs the remainder. He explains that it may do so “by virtue of its preponderance in numbers, or in influence, or in force of conviction, or in external resources, or in many other ways.” Sir George Cornewall Lewis thought that where the ultimate decision is vested in a body there is no alternative other than to count numbers, and to abide by the opinion of a majority. But in alleging that “no historian, in discussing the justice or propriety of any decision of a legislative body, or of a court of justice, thinks of defending the decision of the majority by saying that it was the decision of the majority,” he did not anticipate the view of the English historian Hearnshaw. According to the latter, “The faith of a democrat requires him to believe that in the long run the majority of the people finds its way to the truth, and that in the long run it tries to do the right.”

“In the large city of today, there are thousands of lawyers, but there is no bar.” With this remark, Roscoe Pound five years ago called attention to the situation which had resulted in the United States from the absence of a corporate profession equipped to administer discipline and govern itself. The presence in all communities of lawyers whose character or equipment rendered them unfit to practice had brought the entire profession into disrepute and had contributed largely to the encroachment of banks, trust companies, and other lay agencies upon the legal field.

The Conference held its ninth annual meeting in Washington on October 1-3, 1931. Authorized by the Judiciary Act of September 14, 1922, the conference of the senior circuit judges with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the Attorney-General has become an established part of the judicial system of the United States. The reports of these conferences are to be found in the annual reports of the Attorney-General, beginning in 1924. The 1922 and 1923 reports may best be found in the Texas Law Review, Vol. II, pages 445 and 448, and in the Journal of the American Judicature Society, Vol. VIII, pages 85 and 92. In view of the general inaccessibility of the reports of the Attorney-General to the legal profession, it has been suggested that they be published in the Supreme Court Reports. The suggestion has not as yet, however, been adopted.

The second regular presidential election held in Germany since the adoption of the present constitution was completed on April 10, following the failure of each of the five candidates to poll a majority of the popular votes at the first election on March 13. As a result of the election, President Paul von Hindenburg was reflected for another term of seven years beginning May 5. This election was important, first, because the Weimar constitutional system was threatened, and secondly, because the threatening force, Hitlerism, if victorious, not only presaged a profound change in the existing form of government in Germany, but might have been the prelude to internal strife, affecting the financial stake of the world in Germany, and possibly endangering international peace.

The Council of the League of Nations being commonly considered in the United States as the League's supreme organ, as the body which represents par excellence the League system and spirit, it would seem obvious that there should have been the greater hesitation, in view of our non-membership in the League and our official anti-League declarations, to have direct relations with it. Nevertheless, the record reveals that it has been impossible for the United States government to ignore the Council consistently, and that, as a matter of fact, official relationships of one kind or another have been occasionally entered into with that body also. These relationships have, in the first place, taken the form of direct correspondence between the Council and the United States, which has been carried on at intermittent periods and on various subjects, but which has involved every Administration, and which by this time amounts to a considerable volume.

The approach of another presidential campaign should bring with it a renewal of plans for the study of the election process by a number of students of parties and of public opinion. An important instrument for use in any such investigation would be a scale for the measurement of attitude toward candidates for elective governmental office. The writer considers it timely, therefore, to release for possible use a candidate scale which has undergone considerable testing during the past four years. The psychophysical methods adapted to the use of scale construction by Professor Thurstone have been employed in the production of this scale.