The institution which is today termed the president's cabinet was, in its origin, a creation of George Washington. It grew out of the need of a vigorous, well organized and well directed central administration which should somehow be closely associated and unified under an executive chief magistrate.

Even before the close of the Revolutionary War there were signs that men desired to see the continental government in the guidance of a capable and trusted chief. There were occasional suggestions, too,—among which Pelatiah Webster's is quite the best known—that a committee or board of administrative officials not too strictly hampered by congress, might aid the chief executive as counsellors. Though ready after a brief discussion to establish a single executive magistrate at the head of the projected government, the convention of 1787 seems to have balked at Gouverneur Morris's crude plan for a president's council. The convention yielded, however, to the president the right to require from the principal officers their opinions in writing, and thus unconsciously helped to predetermine a privy council. In the early autumn of 1787 George Mason of Virginia expressed his fear lest there should “grow out of the principal officers of the great departments” what he termed a Council of State. The phrase was quickly reiterated by George Clinton of New York. James Iredell in answer to Mason, perceiving and writing of the analogy between some such body and the English cabinet committee, viewed the possibility of its existence in the new American government as in no wise dangerous.

It has been well said that “The question of the relation of the states to the federal government is the cardinal question of our constitutional system. At every turn of our national development we have been brought face to face with it, and no definition either of statesmen or of judges has ever quieted or decided it. It cannot, indeed, be settled by the opinion of any one generation, because it is a question of growth, and every successive stage of our political and economic development gives it a new aspect, makes it a new question.”

The current discussion provoked by the apparently increasing frequency with which the federal judiciary interferes with the enforcement of the legislative will of the states aptly emphasizes the force of this conclusion. Within late years the federal courts have interposed in numerous cases involving state activities and have asserted the power to control such activities under various circumstances. A brief enumeration of some of the most recent instances of this exercise of power will best indicate the frequency and apparent freedom with which it has been resorted to. Thus it has been held that state boards and commissions, attorneys general and prosecuting attorneys may be enjoined from putting into effect a schedule of railroad rates or gas, telegraph or stockyards rates. alleged to be invalid as working a deprivation of property without due process of law or as otherwise violating the federal constitution.

The seventh edition of Professor Dicey's well-known volume presents, as its most notable feature, an entirely new chapter on the droit administratif. All the previous editions have contained a chapter with this heading, but the doctrines set forth have, within the last half-dozen years, aroused so much adverse criticism that Professor Dicey has reëxamined the whole subject anew and has restated his views in what now constitutes one of the most valuable chapters of a notable book.

The study of administrative law, as a branch of public law, has in recent years obtained increased recognition, and with this has come especial interest in the administrative law of France; for in that country the system has obtained its fullest development. There the evolution has been steady and although it has passed through several stages, is not yet completed. From the beginning of the nineteenth century France has had, for the determination of administrative litigation (the contentieux administratif, as it is termed) a system of special courts separate and distinct from the regular courts of the land. Other countries of continental Europe have more recently established similar courts, it is true, but in none of these is the jurisidiction of such courts as extensive as it is in the administrative courts of the French republic.

The system of direct primaries for New York state proposed in the Hinman-Green bill (Senate, Int. 722; Assembly, Int. 1219) and advocated by Governor Hughes contains certain features which have never been embodied in the primary laws of any other state. The friends of direct primaries in New York have been sharply divided in opinion as to the merits of these features, some considering them an unfortunate compromise, designed to win the support of the party machines, and others regarding them as marking an advance over any primary law heretofore enacted. An outline of the bill and of the discussion which it has aroused, may be of interest to students of direct primaries in other parts of the country who have not had occasion to follow the New York situation in detail.

The more novel provisions of the bill center about the method of proposing candidates for nomination to public office. Under most of the direct primary laws now in force the names of candidates for nomination are placed upon the official primary ballot by petition. Sometimes a declaration of candidacy by the candidate himself is all that is required—except for the payment of a fee, which is occasionally demanded under both systems. Under the Hinman-Green bill there will be two methods by which candidates for nomination may be proposed—or, to use the language of the bill itself, “designated”—and their names placed on the official primary ballot. The first method is by a majority vote of one of the party committees specially provided for in the bill; the second is by petition.