or of admission of parties or of testimony, except so far as their discretion limited them under the order for the inquiry, there were nevertheless difficulties similar to those which are complained of in our civil courts. Some difficulties were overcome, as they are in civil courts, by reasonable agreements of counsel, but the authority of the court to decide more freely than any civil court can, by no means eliminated the rest of the diffi culties. The very power of the court raised difficulties of its own, for instance, as to the exclusion of Admiral Sampson as a party, and as to questions of evidence bearing on his relations to the matter. Thus difficul ties arising in the practice of civil courts which have to be met by principles of com mon law and equity, arise also in military courts, which are grinted power in order to avoid such difficulties. Then, by the very exercise of such power, the military courts create difficulties which, in their turn, have to be overcome by the exercise of some su perior power; thus, sooner or later, the ac tion of both civil and military courts has to be subjected to the decision of some power which can bring a case to an end, not be cause any one is satisfied, but because it is one of the functions of that power to end cases when it is not obliged by some law or principle or necessity to keep it pending. This power to conclude trials is one of the essential necessities of any government.
THE VALUE OF THE CASE. The chief importance of this case, for the military service, may be in the findings of fact and the opinion of what the decision of the Secretary of the Navy describes as "the full court and in his approval of such find ings and such opinion, and in the mingled approval and criticism of the opinions of the members of the court collectively and sever ally by the President of the United States in his review of the entire matter on the appeal. The value of the case as a precedent for
military courts is the decision that "pro priety" requires them not to make a find ing of fact or to render an opinion upon a question on which evidence is excluded by them. Thus the action of the pre siding member of the court, by carrying his exercise of the discretion of a military judge to an extreme, has given occasion for a decision of the Navy Department which at once strengthens the position of Judge Advocates throughout the service by adding a legal principle to clarify the obscure stand ard of fairness for military judges. This de cision also improves the relations of legal counsel of an applicant towards the Judge Advocate, and the members of the court, by opening to them definitely an oppor tunity to argue upon the final limits to be put to the report in consequence of ex cluding one who is offered in any way as a party. The memorandum of the President of the United States on the appeal both warns and protects dissenting members of a court of inquiry. After the storm of professional jealousies and ferocious political passions of which it has been a centre shall have subsided, and the history of this inquiry shall have been written by competent and impartial students of its record, the case will stand as a lead ing precedent of thorough work. All sides labored under circumstances of great diffi culty. Each is said to have been attacked by secret as well as open enemies, some of them in power, and many of them influential. Naturally the stress of personal feeling which was inevitable, led the advocates of each side and the members of the court to be as careful as they were outspoken. Whether the reader was interested in the play of organized forces, or in the fortunes of individuals, his imagination found there a solemn scene. No case can be conceived in which the clear-mindedness and skill re quired by the legal profession were more needed to prevent, by reciprocal objections, waste of energy in scandalous quarrels; to
