My first duty is to apologise for the delay which has caused me deliberately to wait until this relatively late date after my return to Cambridge a year ago before I felt able to deliver this inaugural lecture. For six years the locusts of war ate into my all too limited learning in the law, and involved a loss of all contact with academic life which made advisable a period of recovery—not yet completed—before I plucked up courage to say what I want to say to-day—in all too scanty words. I did, however, in the course of last year, address some informal remarks to the Cambridge University Law Society—and I take this opportunity of thanking their Officers for the invitation—on which occasion I put forward some considerations which seemed to justify the conclusion that the effect of the late war had been to stress the importance of public law.