North Dakota Law Review/Volume 1/Number 4/Our Need

OUR NEED

Hon. Charles Evans Hughes, President of the American Bar Association, just shortly before his retirement as Secretary of State, gave voice to the following:

“As I look throughout the world the one great need appears to me to be, not some formula or rule, but the stimulation and growth of law-abiding sentiment—the dispostion to be reasonable, to be fair, to settle things according to the available standards of justice, to enforce the conceptions of justice against the demands of brute force. This is what it will come to at the end. All our plans for law and order and peace rest on that sentiment. It is useless to be an apostle of peace throughout the world unless you are an apostle of peace at home. It is useless to talk of great institutions of justice throughout the world, unless you have them at home.”

This brings to mind, and causes the Secretary to make bold and repeat, something he said in January, after listening to a very inspirational talk on “World Peace” at one of the Bismarck service clubs, to-wit: Every one who heard the wonderful inspirational talk last week can readily understand the need and the opportunity for building upon the basis of these material values the moral and spiritual values that will really make for better relations here at home. He also understands and appreciates it is hoped, that there can be no “world peace” until men and women learn to live in peace, as friends, as neighbors, as citizens—in the same country, in the same state, in the same community, in the same neighborhood.