assistance might be welcomed. The Committee therefore decided, before proceeding with arrangements for the meeting, to consult the wishes of the Trustees in the matter, and directed the Secretary to bring the matter to the attention of each trustee to obtain his views as to the advisability of holding or omitting the autumn meeting, deciding further that the meeting should be held unless a majority of the trustees expressed a contrary desire. Accordingly on October 9, the Secretary addressed a letter to each trustee from which the following is

an extract:

* * By resolution of the Board it has been made the duty of the Executive Committee to determine the program and the place of the autumn sessions, and the Committee is now ready to arrange for the meeting on November 12 of this year. A number of the Trustees, however, have suggested that under the existing circumstances such a meeting, to be held only for the purposes of discussion, would be inexpedient, and as the Executive Committee will have no special business to bring before the meeting, I have been directed by the Committee to communicate with each member of the Board and ascertain his views as to the advisability of omitting or holding the meeting as provided for.

You will recall that at the meeting held last November there was a general discussion of the conditions arising out of the European war as they affect the work of the Endowment; that it was the consensus of opinion of the Trustees that there was nothing that the Endowment could say or do which would better the situation, and that it was their opinion that it would be unwise for the Endowment to attempt to take any action until the end of the war, when its assistance might be welcomed. These conclusions appear to be controlling at the present time, and it may be that, if the Trustees are of the same opinion, they will see no advantage in convening again this year for a similar discussion, but will prefer to wait until the regular annual meeting next April, when the situation may be favorable to a discussion along definite lines. An early indication of your views will be appreciated, as it is desirable either that arrangements for the meeting be promptly made, or that the Trustees be duly notified of the omission of the meeting in case a majority of the Board expresses the desire that the meeting be not held.

As a result of the canvass, the Board was practically unanimous in expressing its preference to omit the meeting.

During the year covered by this report, the same situation continued, and accordingly at the Executive Committee meeting on October 27, 1916, the Secretary was instructed to call the attention of the trustees to his letter of the previous year indicating the reasons why it appeared inexpedient to hold the autumn meeting, and again asking the vote of each trustee upon the question. The result of this canvass was reported by the Secretary to the Executive Committee on November 27, showing twenty trustees in favor of omitting the meeting, six opposed to its omission, and two not voting. The autumn meeting of 1916 was therefore also omitted; but in deference to the opinion expressed

by six trustees, and in view of the fact that the date for the holding of an autumn meeting had already passed, the Executive Committee adopted a resolution directing that a special meeting of the Board be called in Washington on the afternoon of Thursday, April 19, 1917, the day before the regular annual meeting, this special meeting to be devoted to the discussion of such subjects as the trustees may suggest.

As indicative of the general opinion of the trustees with reference to discussion and action by the Board during the continuance of the European war, reference may be made to the speech of Mr. Choate, Vice-President of the Endowment, at the autumn meeting in 1914. He agreed with previous speakers that the least said and done at present by the Endowment would probably be the most timely. He did not believe that in the present situation there was anything which the Endowment could say or do which would better it. He believed that the ending of the war would be the time for civilization to speak and to act, and that when that time comes, the Endowment would be looked to for guidance and assistance if it does not put itself on record by unwise utterances or action in the meanwhile. President Root, in expressing the same view, said that the mission of the Endowment is not to embarrass the Government and exasperate public opinion by idle words, but to survey the field to see what the Endowment can do to be ready to exercise the greatest influence at the end of the war.

Addresses and Papers of Elihu Root

The Secretary calls to the attention of the Trustees the three volumes of Mr. Root's addresses, edited by Mr. Robert Bacon and the Secretary, which have been published within the course of the present year.

The first volume is entitled Addresses on International Subjects, and contains the ten addresses which Mr. Root has delivered as President of the American Society of International Law, and the speeches on foreign affairs which he delivered in the United States Senate.

The second volume contains the Addresses on Government and Citizenship which Mr. Root has delivered in the course of his public career, and includes the speeches of permanent importance delivered by him in the New York Constitutional Conventions of 1894 and 1915, besides a series of addresses on the administration of justice which can not be too widely read.

The third volume is made up of the addresses which he has delivered on the Military and Colonial Policy of the United States, and of extracts from Mr. Root's Annual Reports as Secretary of War, dealing with the great problems of military and colonial policy growing out of the Spanish-American War.

Three further volumes are in press, devoted to his Latin American addresses, his arguments on behalf of the United States in the North Atlantic Fisheries Arbitration at The Hague, 1910, and miscellaneous addresses dealing with ques

tions of an educational and commemorative and political nature. Mr. Root's state papers, prepared while and as Secretary of State, will form a second series. The volumes are published by the Harvard University Press and not by the Endowment, and the Trustees are in no way responsible for their publication, although the preparation of the papers and documents for publication, with accompanying notes, has been done in the Secretary's office.

The Secretary feels, however, and therefore states to the Trustees that in the opinion of the editors, the publication of Mr. Root's addresses and speeches and his reports as Secretary of War, is a genuine contribution to the history of the United States since the Spanish-American War, and that in issuing them the editors are themselves rendering no small public service.

The Interparliamentary Union

The American Group of the Interparliamentary Union held its fourteenth annual meeting on February 22, the date fixed in the by-laws of the Group adopted in 1916. Hon. James L. Slayden, of Texas, was unanimously reelected President of the Group, together with all the other officers. Hon. Wm. D. B. Ainey, of Pennsylvania, was reelected President of the Japanese-American Section of the Interparliamentary Union. Mr. Ainey is no longer a member of Congress, having been appointed Chairman of the Public Service Commission of Pennsylvania; but in recognition of his deep interest in the work of the Interparliamentary Union, he was elected a permanent member of the American Group in 1915. The former members of Congress who have been honored in like manner by election to permanent membership, are Hon. Warren Keifer, of Springfield, Ohio, who was speaker of the Forty-seventh Congress; Hon. Richard Bartholdt, of St. Louis, who was president of the American Group for thirteen years, from its organization in 1895; Hon. Elihu Root, of New York, and Hon. Theodore E. Burton, now also of New York.

The Executive Committee of the American Group is authorized, under a resolution adopted in 1916, to send delegates to any conference of neutral powers which may be called at any time during or after the European war, if in the judgment of the Committee it is desirable that the American Congress shall be represented in such a conference. At present there appears no probability that another effort to hold such a conference will be made.

The Assistant Secretary of the Endowment has continued to serve as the Executive Secretary of the American Group, and has kept in regular correspondence with Dr. Christian L. Lange, the Secretary General of the Interparliamentary Union, although protracted delays have marked the interchange of letters. Dr. Lange continues to maintain temporary headquarters at Christiania. Conditions are such that he is unable to keep in touch with many of the national groups of the Union, and the organization may be said to be only marking time

until the close of the war. The United States Congress has continued its annual subvention of $2,000 to the Union, and the Diplomatic and Consular Act for 1917-18 again carries an appropriation of $40,000 for the entertainment in the United States of the Nineteenth Conference of the Union in the year 1918. The invitation to hold the next conference in this country was first extended in 1914, and would have been presented at the Conference called in Stockholm, Sweden, in that year, had it not been necessary to abandon the conference after the outbreak of the European war. It is felt by the European Groups that whenever it is possible to hold the next conference, which will be the Nineteenth, which was to have met in Stockholm, it should by all means be held in this country.

International Organization

The effect of the war upon the activities of the Interparliamentary Union is typical of what has happened to international organization in practically all branches of associated effort for the betterment of mankind. The last published report of the Office Central des Institutes Internationales, with headquarters. at Brussels, the Director of which, Mr. Henri La Fontaine, has been in the United States for the past two years, lists no less than 260 of these organizations, unions, associations, institutes, commissions, bureaux, offices, conferences and congresses, in all branches of knowledge, largely for the advancement of science in all its departments, but devoted also to phases of economic, sociological, literary, artistic, and human interests with a view to cooperation in all countries. Practically all of these organizations have been put out of business by the war. Many of them will no doubt be reorganized and rehabilitated when the war is over. Many of them may never be revived. Their records have been lost, their personnel broken up, and a great hiatus created in the whole international movement from this point of view. How tremendous the loss is, is indicated in the following extract from Mr. La Fontaine's summary of the purpose and results of this movement:

The international organization is due to a vast and continuous movement. Secular in its origin, it has, of late years, acquired an immense development. It tends towards much greater cooperation between similar groups in all countries; to the extension of a greater acquisition of knowledge and of technique throughout the world; to the unification of methods and to international agreements on all points, where possible, and recognized as desirable.

International associations have become the centralizing organs of this movement; whether official or private, created by the union of States, or formed by the drawing together of national federations of free initiative, it is to them that we owe the results which have transformed the world's mode of living; the universal post; the extension of the decimal metric system to all relations; the coordination beyond the frontiers of railway

services and navigation; the international law applicable to all the judicial relations of persons and property; the arbitration between nations substituting the reign of peace to the decisions of war; the interparliamentary discussions of great world's interests; cooperation, charity and assurance, extending to all countries the sphere of solidarity and fraternity; the shelter to the public health from great scourges, gained by concerted hygienic measures; the works of art and books protected internationally, exchanged, lent, and the documentation universalized; science studied in common, and, by the contributions of partial results obtained by workers in all countries, constituted into a universal synthesis of knowledge.

All this remarkable development of internationalism, built up so patiently and devotedly through many years, has been torn up by the roots, and represents not the least of the losses to civilization which the European war has effected, and one that has attracted little attention. As the months roll by, the aggregate of these losses becomes increasingly appalling.

A recent computation by an English expert placed the aggregate indebtedness of the belligerents, already incurred in consequence of the war, at sixtysix billions of dollars. It is a sum beyond the power of the imagination to grasp; and it involves a burden of future taxation which generations yet unborn must carry; but it is a comparatively small portion of the losses and costs incurred, when account is taken of the financial burdens forced upon the neutral nations, of the destruction of private property, and of the diversion of labor from its legitimate channels. It does not take cognizance of the money value of the human lives lost, already calculated to total 10,000,000 men killed, wounded and permanently incapacitated, nor of the sorrows, sufferings and anguish of millions upon millions of human beings. In his letter conveying his trust to the trustees of the Endowment, Mr. Andrew Carnegie described war as "the foulest blot upon our civilization"; and he added that "the one end the Trustees shall keep unceasingly in view until it is attained, is the speedy abolition of international war between so-called civilized nations." The only gleam of comfort which it is possible to find in the present situation is the hope that the horrors of a war more wasteful and more appalling than any the world has ever seen or dreamed of, may awaken all nations to the realization that our civilization can only rescue itself from the fate of its predecessors in past ages, by agreement, when terms of peace are considered, to revive and continue the Hague Conferences, to rehabilitate and extend the principles of international law, and to submit the controversies of the future to the decisions of an International Court of Justice.

The Requirements for Appropriation

The statement of the requirements for appropriation for the Endowment headquarters for the ensuing fiscal year appears in the budget for 1916-17. They are substantially the same as for the two previous fiscal years.