OBITUARY NOTICES. 
493 
immediate application to some question of the day, was the 
appreciation of the importance of the establishment of a 
School of Comparative Jurisprudence, in which the law of 
the civilized world should be taught as a history and as a 
philosophy, “ from the first rude germs of the clan stage of 
human government up to the highest evolutions of that in¬ 
ternational law which today sits supreme above all polities 
and all conventions of men.” 
In 1891 he published a comprehensive scheme for such a 
school and received for it the hearty endorsement of the 
ablest jurists of the world. 
The first years of this decade showed great literary activ¬ 
ity on the part of Doctor Welling, resulting in a paper, read 
before the Anthropological Society of Washington, on the 
u Law of Malthus.” As usual, he began with history, show¬ 
ing that there were Malthusians in the world before Mal¬ 
thus; that Plato proposed to regulate the conditions of mar¬ 
riage in his ideal republic, and Aristotle suggested that the 
number as well as the quality of the offspring within the 
state should be subject to restrictions. 
Another paper of this period was read before the New 
York Historical Society, upon “Connecticut Federalism, or 
Aristocratic Politics in a Social Democracy.” The State of 
Connecticut was selected for this discussion “ because of the 
greater simplicity of her social tissue during the early colo¬ 
nial period; because of her priority in ordinating under the 
new conditions of American life a purely independent and 
popular form of self-government; because of the preemi¬ 
nence she had, through her representative men in the Fed¬ 
eral convention, in determining the structure of our federative 
policy ; because of the active share she took in dressing the 
balances of the Constitution in the fateful matter of slavery, 
thus helping to contrive the sectional equilibrium which 
she was afterward destined to shake, and, finally, because of 
the greater tenacity with which she clung to the Federalist 
party in its origin, in the period of its proud ascendency, 
and in the days of its decline, down to the hour of the ‘dim 
eclipse within the closed doors of the Hartford convention.’ ” 
