I have been greatly honoured by your invitation to take the chair on this interesting occasion. It gives me special pleasure to be able to introduce to this distinguished¹ audience my friend, Mr. Beck, Solicitor-General of the United States. It is a great and responsible office; but long before he held it he was known to the English public and to English readers as the author who, perhaps more than any other writer in our language, contributed a statement of the Allied² case in the Great War which produced effects far beyond the country in which it was written or the public to which it was first addressed. Mr. Beck approached that great theme in the spirit of a great judge; he marshalled his arguments with the skill of a great advocate, and the combination of these qualities—qualities, highly appreciated everywhere, but nowhere more than in this Hall and among a Gray's Inn audience—has given an epoch-making character to his work. To-day he comes before us in a different character. He is neither judge nor advocate, but historian: and he offers to guide us through one of the most interesting and important enterprises in which our common race has ever been engaged.

The framers of the American Constitution were faced with an entirely³ new problem, so far, at all events, as the English-speaking world was concerned; and though they founded their doctrines⁴ upon the English traditions of law and liberty, they had to deal with circumstances which none of their British progenitors⁵ had to face, and they showed a masterly spirit in adapting the ideas of which they were the heirs to a new country and new conditions. The result is one of the greatest pieces of constructive⁶ statesmanship ever accomplished⁷. We, who belong to the British Empire, are at this moment engaged, under very different circumstances, in welding slowly and gradually the scattered

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