morning.

THE PRESIDENT:

ject:

Here is the by-law on the sub

"In pursuance of Article X of the constitution, there shall be the following standing committees: A committee on legislation, to whom shall stand referred all matters of legislation recommended by the Association at any of its meetings, and who shall be charged with the duty of framing suitable legislation to carry such recommendation in effect, if not already adopted by the Association, and of taking all proper measures to aid in securing the enactment of the same by the Legislature."

It seems to me, therefore, that unless the Association wants to amend the by-laws, that that should go to the committee on legislation, and I shall so hold, unless a motion is made to amend the by-laws.

MR. FITZHUGH: Then I want to submit that the President, this morning, was in error in referring it to us. THE PRESIDENT: Oh, no, I referred it to you for recommendation.

MR. FITZHUGH:

Then, all we have done is to re

port it out, with our recommendation.

THE PRESIDENT: What will you do with the resolution, gentlemen?

JUDGE I. H. PERES: I move its passage, as the sense of the Association.

The motion was duly seconded and carried.

THE PRESIDENT: The motion prevails. It will be up to the new president as to which committee he will refer it.

Is there any further business besides the election of officers, which is to come before the Association?

MR. WINCHESTER: Mr. President, I move that we take a five-minutes' recess.

After a few minutes recess, the meeting was called to order.

THE PRESIDENT: Ladies and gentlemen of the Bar Association, I present, without further introduction to you, the one who, by virtue of his office, is the first lawyer in the United States. I present more than that. I present a vigorous, patriotic and militant American,

General Mitchell Palmer, Attorney-General of the United States. (Applause).

ADDRESS OF ATTORNEY-GENERAL PALMER.

Mr. President, gentlemen of the Tennessee Bar Association, ladies and gentlemen. I take it that, if there is any place where a man is permitted to talk shop it is in a room where a lawyer finds himself addressing an audience of lawyers. And so I propose to talk shop a little while this afternoon to you. I do not have in mind to discuss the activities of the great law office over which I happen to be at the time presiding. Everything which the Department of Justice has done, of course, lawyers know about, and what the Department of Justice proposes to do, perhaps lawyers ought not to know about. But I want to go a little further back and discuss some phases, some of the legal phases of the interesting questions arising out of the treatment of private property during the great war, and in discussing those questions, I must still confess to talking shop, because they are questions which were raised, and many of them settled, during the time that it was my privilege to occupy the interesting and unusual public office of alien property custodian. So I feel that I have a sort of right of proprietorship in questions involving the use of private property during the war. For, when the war broke out, and I discovered for the first time that I had become an old man, realized that the Quartermaster's Department probably did not have a belt big enough to fit me, and consequently I could not get into active service, I fumed about until I found myself reasonably happy in the position which the President gave, in which it became my altogether pleasurable job to capture all the German property in America.

We were pretty energetic in that business, and if any property got away from us, I have not yet heard about it. We collected together nearly three quarters of a billion dollars' worth of property, converting all of the cash that we could lay our hands on into Government bonds, so that I found myself in the interesting position of being the largest buyer of Liberty Bonds in the United States. But for me, it was, of course, an easy and pleasant task to buy the bonds, for I bought Liberty Bonds with the Kaiser's own money. Out in a Middle West city, in the early days of the war, a woman school teach

er died; and how she ever came to do it, on the salary of a school teacher, I do not know, but she had amassed quite a little fortune. She had, as we lawyers say, first made her last will and testament, wherein and whereby she bequeathed the sum of $10,000.00 to Von Hindenburg. I took that. I converted it into Liberty Bonds, and the proceeds were used to buy munitions of war, and thus our boys delivered the legacy to Hindenburg at his home address.

So, in approaching this question, I tread upon my own ground. I feel just a little like I did in the early days of my law practice up in the country in Pennsylvania, when I was called upon to render an informal opinion on an interesting question of law. A young man walked into my office one day, whom I recognized as living in my part of the city, and said to me: "Mr. Palmer, I would like to ask you a question?" I said, “All right. That is what I am here for. What is it?" "Why," he said, "my question is this. If my neighbor's dog comes into my back yard and kills my chickens, what can I do about it?" I said: "That is a very simple proposition. All you have got to do is to go before a Justice of the Peace, swear that it was your neighbor's dog and swear to the value of your chicken, and the Squire will give you a judgment, and you can go out and collect it." He said: "I can do that, can I?" I said, "Of course, you can." And he started out. When he got to the door, I said, "By the way, young man, whose dog was that?" "Why," he said, "that was your dog." (Laughter). Well, I thought it was about my time to settle that piece of litigation, and so I asked him how much his chicken was worth, and the high cost of living had struck our town, and he said it was worth $1.65, which I promptly paid, and then I charged him $5.00 for the legal advice (laughter) and I always thought I got out of that about even (laughter). You can generally depend on country lawyers to come out even, in matters of that sort.

So, I feel that this matter of private property during the war, is more or less my dog. I feel some responsibility for the treatment of German property on American soil and some responsibility for the very effective and thorough manner in which the Peace Commissioners at Paris have backed up everything that we did in this country in relation to it. And so, I want to discuss, for

a little while, that question. You know, it is one of the interesting things about this treaty of peace that we hear so much about, that most of the matters that are being debated in reference to it are matters which concern the United States only in a remote way, certainly in a very indirect way, and the only thing in the whole treaty which directly concerns and affects American interest and American business and banking interest, is this one subject, of the treatment of private property in the belligerent countries. The treaty has been signed and the agreement, so far as that goes, has been made as to the treatment of this property, and I shall consider the subject as if that were a settled fact, because, after the shouting and the tumult dies, the treaty will be ratified (Applause). And I sometimes think, that if the American business man would take the trouble to read the treaty through, which I doubt if many of them have done, and see the very splendid and effective manner in which American business has been proteced through all future time against the serious menace of another industrial and commercial invasion of our soil by any enemy, the enthusiastic support which the terms of the treaty would receive from American business, if communicated to their servants in Washington, would have a very conciliating effect in facilitating the work of the ratification of the treaty. Several years' service in the Congress of the United States leads me to the conclusion that the people down at Washington beneath the dome of the Capitol are afraid of nobody except their own people back home, and if the people would study these questions carefully and see their importance, I feel pretty well satisfied that earlier results than otherwise might come to us. Because I have undertaken to make the first statement which has been made, as far as I know, in public, in reference to the treatment of private property during the war, I have done what I very seldom do, committed my address to writing. If you will pardon my following the copy, rather closely for a time, I hope that, after I have concluded this address, which is, more than for anyone, for the lawyers of the State, with your permission, if the weather does not get too oppressive, I shall be glad to go on from my copy to discuss very briefly some of the interesting problems which are now presented to us all for solution, to us all, as citizens, rather than as professional men.

"PRIVATE PROPERTY DURING THE WAR."

No feature of the great war was so radical a departure from precedents, apparently well settled, as the invasion of private rights and private property. For many generations all the civilized nations had come to accept principles based upon the desire to alleviate the hardships of war; whereby, hostilities were confined to governments and the military forces, leaving practically unaffected the civilian population and their rights. It had come to be generally agreed that as to private property on land, although belligerents had the rights to confiscate it, that right had properly fallen into general disuse. The position of this country was defined in a decision by Chief Justice Marshall in Brown v. United States, 8 Cranch 110, from which I quote:

"Respecting the power of government no doubt is entertained. That war gives to the sovereign full right to take the persons and confiscate the property of the enemy wherever found, is conceded. The mitigations of this rigid rule, which the humane and wise policy of modern times has introduced into practice, will more or less affect the exercise of this right, but cannot impair the right itself. That remains undiminished, and when the sovereign authority shall choose to bring it into operation, the judicial department must give effect to its will. But until that will shall be expressed, no power of condemnation can exist in the court."

"Commercial nations, in the situation of the United States, have always a considerable quantity of property in the possession of their neighbors. When war breaks out, the question, what shall be done with enemy property in our country, is a question rather of policy than of law. The rule which we apply to the property of our enemy will be applied by him to the property of our citizens. Like all other questions of policy, it is proper for the consideration of a department which can modify it at will; not for the consideration of a department which can pursue only the law as it is written. It is proper for the consideration of the legislature, not of the executive or judiciary."

As to private property at sea, however, there has been no relaxation of the right of confiscation, for such property has always been subject to seizure and appropriation by an enemy.