The retirement of Mr. Charles Evans Hughes from the Presidency
of the Supreme Court—and, so, no doubt, from public life altogether—at the age of 79 is an event of im- portance in the life of the United States. For though Mr. Hughes was Secretary of State under President Harding from 1921 to 1925 and a Judge of the Permanent Court of Inter- national justice from 1928-3o it is as a great national rather than a great international figure that he will be remembered. I heard him make what must historically rank as his greatest speech, though there was little eloquence about it, at the Washington Disarmament Conference in 192i—the speech that condemned some millions of tons of British, American and Japanese warships to the scrap-heap. The retiring Chief Justice has a pleasantly dry wit,—as when he referred genially in conversation to " a man who said he once spent a fortnight in Philadelphia on a Sunday afternoon." He is not a Philadelphian.
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