At Princeton

Two thousand excited young men and women (from 245 institutions of learning), all of whom had heard that there is a World Court at The Hague, assembled last week at Princeton University to attend a National Collegiate World Court Conference, which had been convoked there very largely on the strength of a report that a famed Chicago shirtsleeve-barrister, Clarence Darrow, would address the gathering.

While everyone waited for Mr. Darrow to tear the Court to tatters, U. S. Senator Irvine L. Lenroot of Wisconsin, affirmative speaker, broached the subject, in part as follows:

"There are only four methods of settling disputes when diplomacy has been exhausted: by resort to the League of Nations of those states that are members of the League, by resort to arbitration, by resort to the World Court, by war. Resort to war by weak nations is impossible. . . .

"You may ask if we adhere to the Court what objections will be imposed upon us. I answer, just one, the payment of our proportionate share of the expenses of the Court, which will amount to about $35,000 a year.

"Next, you may ask what benefits will we receive if we adhere to the Court. Frankly, I answer none, except as we are interested in the peace of the world."

Lawyer Darrow then adjusted his thumbs for battle, in the armholes of his vest, and twitted Senator Lenroot as follows, for having grown tedious at one point, anent the Court's organization:

"I would have been pleased to have heard from my distinguished friend more of a discussion of what this World Court was going to do. I gathered from it that the principal part of it related to the method of the appointment of the judges and the payment of their salaries. If it is not to stop war, if it will not stop war, or has any tendency to end war and if we will not be bound by anything it does, in case we go in, I wonder what it is all about anyhow and whether it is worth while for the youth of America to get all 'het up' over it."

To many the pungent Darrowesque phrases seemed often melodramatic and irrelevant. Mr. Lewis Fox (Princeton, 1926), originator of the conference idea, was able to point to an almost unanimous pro-Court vote at its close.