Any person who studies the record of the Supreme Court of the United States must arrive somewhere near the conclusion that body of nine justices is the most powerful peacetime agency of government in this country. While the Supreme Court has continued to be composed, for the most part, of aged men who might be regarded as eligible to the comforts of retirement after lives of strenuous legal activity, the judicial duties which it ha to perform have become continually more oppressive. During the last decade, as the result of a speeding-up process, the court has actually considered an average of five-hundred and forty two cases annually, over two-hundred and twenty-five more than the average which it considered annually during the ten-year period from 1885 to 1894, and over one-hundred and forty more than the annual average from 1905 to 1914. In the put fifty years the court's production in the matter of cases considered has practically doubled. The working force has not been increased, and, if age is any index, its strength and vitality has not been enhanced.