The growing strength of the various political movements for limiting judicial authority over constitutional questions has aroused a new interest in the origin of the courts' power. Wherever the source be found, or however the practice may have developed, the authority now exercised by the United States supreme court does not determine the proper function of state courts in local cases, which is now the chief issue; but its study throws some light on the attitude that each of the three departments of government—legislative, executive and judicial—ought to assume toward the subject of constitutional law, and is of particular interest to the many citizens whose opinion of the new proposals will be more or less favorable as they appear to bring us back nearer to original ideals or to carry us farther away. The historical study is interesting also in showing that our forefathers in their discussions by no means adopted the viewpoint of most of the modern writers—of assuming that whenever a law is declared unconstitutional, the court is always right, and is performing a public service in so deciding.

At present neither the prospect of home rule nor the danger from Germany nor the mighty design of imperial federation assails the public mind of England so insistently as the demand for the enfranchisement of women. Since 1905 it has come to be realized that British men and women are face to face with a change of profound importance, and that the veil of the future hides immense possibilities of good or of ill soon to come.

Allowing British women to take part in the government of the realm is a question of the last century and particularly of the years since 1867, but the antiquarian traces the elements of the problem in the feudal law of the earlier middle ages, when tenure and service rather than persons furnished the basis of organization, and when instances occur of women taking part in local affairs and holding office and jurisdiction. For the most part, however, these instances are valuable now merely as the slender basis for legal argument.

Since the separation of church and state in 1905 the paramount question of French internal politics has been that of electoral reform. No other question has been so much discussed in parliament and in the country, or has been the subject of so many reports, books, brochures and magazine articles. It has occupied a leading place in the ministerial declarations of the last five cabinets and has caused the downfall of one. It was one of the paramount issues in the parliamentary elections of 1910 and an overwhelming majority of the deputies in the present chamber were chosen upon programs which pledged them to the support of electoral reform. Furthermore, the present chamber, elected in 1910, has on four different occasions by large majorities voted in favor of electoral reform and on July 10, 1912, it passed a bill by a vote of 339 to 217 embodying the more important reforms demanded by the country. But so far the senate has refused its concurrence.