It is just fifty-five years since Walter Bagehot wrote his Physics and Politics, a very suggestive book in its day. He began the first chapter of this book with a reference to “the sudden acquisition of much physical knowledge” which had marked the second half of the nineteenth century, and declared it his purpose to show the bearing of these new ideks upon the political conceptions of mankind. That purpose he, fulfilled with much ingenuity, pointing out the various lines along which the advance in natural science seemed to suggest modifications in the old theories of the state and of government.

This was only a half-century ago; yet the new physics of Bagehot's day has already growh old. Its basic concepts have been turned inside out and upside down. Its laws relating to the indestructibility of mass and the conservation of energy have been radically amended. Even a generation ago the atom was held to be the ultimate and indivisible unit in the composition of the universe. It was the basis upon which the scientists of the nineteenth century built up an inclusive set of laws and principles relating to the structure of all creation. No one had ever seen an atom, but its existence could be postulated and its properties were held to be knowable.

In the August, 1926, number of this journal, Professor W. W. Willoughby presented some conclusions regarding the conception of sovereignty and the range of its applicability in political science, together with some interesting suggestions for the clarification of political theory. His article is devoted primarily to an exposition and criticism of the juristic theories of Professor H. Krabbe, and the gist of his criticism is that Krabbe, in common with the translators of his Modern Theory of the State and with Duguit, fails to distinguish between ethical and legal validity. Krabbe's attack upon the conception of sovereignty is therefore due to a confusion: The legal supremacy which the analytical jurist attributes to the state for purely legal purposes is taken as including also an assertion of moral supremacy. Accordingly, the fact that a legally valid law may be criticized as opposed to moral sentiment or to public interest is turned into an objection against the view that the state, for juristic purposes, may be regarded as a legally sovereign will. Professor Willoughby implies that clarity can be introduced into the whole discussion simply by avoiding this confusion. The justice or utility of a law is a wholly proper question for the moralist, but it is quite irrelevant to the juristic problem, which concerns merely the legal competence of the agency enacting or enforcing the law. “We find in Krabbe, and also in his translators, …. that same mistaken idea which is to be discovered in Duguit, that an inquiry into the idealistic or utilitarian validity of law, as determined by its substantive provisions and purposes sought to be achieved by its enforcement, has a relevancy to, and that its conclusions can affect, the validity and usefulness of the purely formalistic concepts which the positive or analytic jurist employs.”

Attentive observers of conditions in Italy are well aware that Fascism is an exceedingly complicated phenomenon; that what seems to be simply a dictatorship of the upper classes in reality presents many surprising and apparently contradictory features. Fascism, indeed, has been likened to a great river into which numerous tributaries have poured their waters. Among these tributaries are such movements as Nationalism, Futurism, and Syndicalism. Besides, Fascism is more than a practical experiment in government. It has developed a theory and a philosophy, and, one may even add, an art, a mysticism, and a religion. “Fascism,” declares Mussolini, “has a doctrine, or, if you will, a philosophy with regard to all the questions which beset the human mind today.” And again he remarks, “We play upon every chord of the lyre, from violence to religion, from art to politics.”

The stages in the outward history of Fascism need only be mentioned. The movement had humble and, its enemies say, even sordid beginnings. The first Fascio di Combattimento was formed in March, 1919, by Mussolini and other derelicts of the war. This organization, swollen by all sorts of unexpected accretions, was transformed into the National Fascist party in November, 1921. In October, 1922, occurred the sensational march on Rome, which placed the party exultantly, but none too securely, in the seat of power. The murder of Matteotti in May, 1924, precipitated a dangerous crisis in which Fascism appeared to be momentarily on the defensive, but from which it triumphantly emerged as complete master of the situation. Since then it has effectually quelled all opposition and has proceeded to the realization of its constructive program, of which the great Labor Charter of April, 1927, is thus far the most impressive item.

When men reflect about government, whether practically or academically, they always turn up, if they think deeply enough, two central problems: first, how to ensure that government shall do what it is supposed to do, and secondly, how to ensure that it shall not do other things. One is the problem of efficiency, the other the problem of control; and around the two is built most, perhaps all, of the so-called science of politics. At some periods the need for control seems the more vital and pressing. It seemed so to Englishmen, for example, during the two centuries following the accession of the Stuarts. At other times and places the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and in fifteenth century Europe, as in contemporary Italy, the dominant desire was for government strong enough and untrammelled enough to stem successfully a rising tide of disorder. Each age strikes its own balance in favor of one principle or the other, and thereby touches the opposite principle into action to redress the balance at some new point of readjustment.

The competing claims of efficiency and control have often expressed themselves in the form of controversy concerning the comparative merits of government by discretion and govern-ment by law—or, in Harrington's phrase, a government of laws and a government of men. In this form the conflict has left its mark everywhere on political thought since Aristotle. Discretion means freedom for government to choose among possible alternatives of action. As one judge has said, “In honest plain language it means ‘Do as you like.’” It is thus a condition of efficiency, but it is very apt to exact the price of arbitrariness. Law, on the other hand, requires that government shall act by set rule, shall limit itself to a particular way of acting in each particular situation. It seeks to eliminate choice in favor of certainty; it narrows the possible range of governmental action in order that such action may be predicted and controlled in advance.

To comment upon the far-reaching effects of modern warfare upon national life is in these days commonplace. Nevertheless, nearly ten years after Versailles, countless ramifications of the World War's long-term effects remain unexplored. Silent but profound social and political readjustments were set in motion which are only now beginning to be studied by trained observers of human institutions, while the public at large scarcely suspects what is going on.

The administrative organization of France has not escaped these subtle processes. A bureaucratic inheritance surviving a half-dozen political revolutions, it has perhaps been more deeply shaken by events of the last fifteen years than in any period of similar length since the French Revolution itself. Some of these changes bid fair to modify not only the popular attitude toward the ubiquitous fonctionnaire, but the organization and spirit of the civil service as well.

For a proper understanding of the causes and significance of this administrative evolution, we must revert for a moment to the scene as it appeared in 1914. Then the public service of France was a highly centralized hierarchical organization, with a democratic façade, but resting none the less upon the imperial foundations laid by Napoleon. There were as many as 900,000 persons in public employment, including the staffs of the départements and the communes. As in America to-day, the man in the street was sure this number was excessive. He remembered, doubtless, that France had done very well with 40,000 civil servants in Balzac's day, when the population of the country was only a fourth smaller than in 1914. Why, then, were twenty times as many needed in the twentieth century? As a matter of fact, the French public service made use of a staff which was, in proportion to population, no larger than the English or the American, especially if it be remembered that over 150,000 public school teachers and several thousand telegraph and telephone employees were among the 900,000 civil servants mentioned.

When the problem of second chambers is discussed, we frequently find that interest is confined to the subsidiary question of technique, omitting the prior question, “Why have a second chamber?” It is in the main assumed that second chambers are universally valid, and therefore attention is centered on the varied methods of selection and the extent of functions. If the primary question is raised at all, it is invariably answered by an appeal to experience. It is claimed that almost all modern governments have for a considerable time had bicameral legislatures, and that it is hazardous to disregard a practice that is so nearly universal. Seldom is an attempt made to go beyond experience and to analyze critically this admittedly wide practice. In fact, a bicameral legislature is generally held to be an unassailable and eternal verity, one of the few axioms of political science.

Nevertheless, among the more systematic writers on political science the validity of the bicameral theory is far from unanimously supported. Even a hasty reference to the history of political ideas shows recurrent dissent. Thus, during the period of democratic ferment inaugurated by the French and American revolutions we find unmistakable opposition. To mention some examples, Samuel Adams, Paine, Turgot, Sieyès, and Condorcet were in favor of the unicameral form. The basis of their hostility is well summarized in the famous dilemma of Sieyès. Sieyès has indeed indicated the broad outlines of the objections; and a succeeding century of bicameral experience shows how difficult it is to escape from his vexatious alternatives. To reconcile faith in democracy with the assumption of the value of an effective check is assuredly not an enviable task. At any rate, for our present purpose suffice it to say that bicameralism has frequently been rejected.

A full history of the English cabinet would be one of the seminal works on the technique of representative government; for, as Bagehot was the first to point out, the cabinet has been the primary source of decision in the modern English institutional system. Few books, it must be added, would be so difficult to write. Until 1917, the cabinet was without a secretary or authentic records; and there are even today purists who regret these obvious innovations. What account we have of its working is thus necessarily spasmodic and partial in character. A statesman who took a note of some meeting where his department was affected, a debate in the House of Commons after some dispute which has entailed resignation, a chance entry in a diary, the occasional revelation of autobiography–it is upon materials such as these that we are largely dependent for our knowledge. Even semi-official accounts, like those of Lord Morley and Mr. Gladstone, hardly give us more than the formal outline of the cabinet as it functions.

Yet one clue to its character has been curiously neglected; and it illustrates, as it happens, the nature of the social system in England in a quite special way. We know the men who occupied cabinet office; and by a careful study of who they were we can at least draw some inferences of interest and even importance. These inferences, let it be said at once, will not explain in any way the technique of the cabinet system. But at least they will serve to measure the way in which the changes in the structure of English social life are reflected in the choice of those responsible for the nation's effective governance.

Few movements in the history of American politics and political thought have been of equal immediate or enduring importance with that associated with the name of Thomas Jefferson. And yet Jefferson never published anything other than very brief and inadequate discussions of the principles for which he stood. His only systematic exposition of his political ideas is found in his famous Notes on Virginia. This work, however, was written in 1781-82 and deals but remotely with the issues which were to occupy the stage after 1789. Neither in Jefferson's own writings nor in those of Madison and Monroe, his successors as official head of the Republican party and as president of the United States, do we find any adequate exposition of the theories associated with the era of Jeffersonian democracy. It is only in the extensive works of John Taylor of Caroline, a friend and associate of these men in the political battles of that period, that such an exposition is to be found. Jefferson wrote that “Colonel Taylor and myself have rarely, if ever, differed in any political principle of importance.” John Randolph said that Taylor's “disinterested principles” were “the only bond of union among Republicans.” And Timothy Pickering calls him “the Goliath of the party.” As Henry Adams has said, Taylor was regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by the Virginia school and by many other leaders of his time, but it is equally true that his writings have occupied a position of obscurity since his death. This obscurity, however, does not alter the fact that they were influential in their time and are today the best source of information concerning the principles of both the earlier and later phases of the movement initiated by Jefferson during the first years under the Constitution.

“Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.” Thus the authors of The Federalist defined the purposes of the government created by the Federal Convention. But they reached this definition as the conclusion to a discussion of the factious nature of mankind. Madison had already remarked that the causes of faction could not be removed without abolishing the liberty which is essential to political life. He believed, however, that the control of its effects was within human power. To the mind of the Virginian the vital political forces in the state should be tied up in a nice poise through the clauses of a written constitution. A government so contrived would, as Madison believed, “secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation.”

The ideal which Madison envisaged was one of dynamic equilibrium. He thought that by deriving the various branches of the government from different sources all positive action to the detriment of established order and guaranteed rights would be checked from the outset. Every safeguard against “the mutability of public councils” was to be embodied in the interior structure of the government itself. It was not enough that government should have a dependence upon the people; “experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

The political experience to which Madison referred was fresh in the minds of all the men who assembled at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. It was afforded by the thirteen states, in none of which did political practice square with the expressed provisions of its constitution.

It is not in the least unusual, in newspaper accounts of a strike, riot, flood, or fire, to read that the governor has proclaimed martial law and summoned the militia to the threatened zone. However exaggerated such reports may be, they are evidence of a general belief that there exists some mysterious “martial law” which, when proclaimed, augments the powers of soldiers and paves the way for heroic measures. Nor are these notions wholly fanciful. For such a proclamation may indeed be followed by an extraordinary régime in which the military authority will issue regulations for the conduct of the civil population, troops may be called upon to take life, and perhaps the individuals accused of fomenting trouble will be held without authority of a court, or in some cases may even be tried by a military tribunal. Quite likely these severe measures will receive the approval of public opinion. Yet it is surprising that a people ordinarily rather legalistic should have evinced so little disposition to inquire what rules of law, if any, govern the exercise of these military powers. To answering that unasked query the present study is addressed.

First of all, let me say that there is no question on which you can develop more controversy than the reporting of political news. Within the profession, within the newspaper business, there is a great deal of controversy, and has been for many years, particularly as to whether political news is fairly reported, impartially reported. I have listened to a good deal of discussion on that point. I have recognized, as have others in the newspaper business, the trend of the times—the so-called decrease in the strength of the editorial page, for instance, and the increase in the amount of material of a semi-editorial flavor printed in the news columns.

The first branch of this topic, namely, reporting political news as it affects our domestic politics, seems to me to require an understanding, first, of the pressure and the difficulties that newspaper men face in handling news of campaigns and, second, of some of the pitfalls which they encounter between campaigns. I make that division arbitrarily, because the subject seems to divide itself in my own mind into those two general fields.

It is much easier to report political news between campaigns than it is during campaigns. For one thing, your audience is not sensitive between campaigns. Especially just after a campaign has been concluded there is a sort of feeling that the victorious candidate, the newly inaugurated President, the newly introduced Congress, should have what we call popularly a square deal—as if, by inference, they did not have a square deal before.

A bloc system has superimposed itself upon national legislatures. Although their members are elected on a definite territorial basis, they associate themselves together in response to interests in their constituencies which have little relation to their electoral districts. Thus, in the United States, a foreign word has come into use to designate the organized agricultural interests which constitute the farm bloc.

More or less definite aggregations of this kind have been formed throughout parliamentary history. Some of these have been the result of particular manufacturing or commercial interests; other groupings have followed religious or social-class lines of cleavage; nevertheless, the basis of representation, in the popularly elected chambers, has remained territorial. Since 1919, however, an international assembly has been built up on a new political pattern. This is the Conference of the International Labor Organization, which convened for its tenth session at Geneva, in May, 1927, and in the following October completed the eighth year of its history. Notwithstanding the fact that structurally this body has a national basis, in that the delegates are sent by different member states, the conferences derive their character and mode of operation, not so much from the member states as from the three component groups in which national differences are more or less subordinate. These groups represent, respectively, the governments, the employers, and the workers of the several countries.

The diplomatic relations between China and Russia in the past decade present a tangle of converging factors among which the Chinese revolution, the World War, and the Russian revolution play a great part. They are, however, only a phase in the larger process of imperial dissolution and national revival which has encompassed both the Russian and Chinese states and remarkably transformed them within the space of a generation. It is in relation to the forces unleashed by the disintegration of the Romanov and Manchu empires that the decade's changes in diplomatic policy must be viewed.

The most significant factor underlying the reorientation of Russian and Chinese foreign policy was the abolition of the monarchy in each country; for, with the fall of the imperial houses, came the beginnings of political and administrative disintegration, the resurgence of local nationalism, and the loosing of the centrifugal forces which the defunct dynasties had held in check. It is not our problem here to trace the constitutional consequences of such a vacancy of power in either domain, but to note the salient fact that it was a difficult, if not impossible, task immediately to create an efficient substitute authority for the dead and departed emperors, and that, in view of that difficulty, provincial separatism was for a time allowed to gain such headway as to constitute a serious menace to the national integrity of both the dissolving empires.

The following pages represent an experiment. They are devoted to an initial attempt to summarize the most important events in the field of public administration in the United States for a calendar year. A series of such summaries, if they could be made reasonably complete, would presumably be of substantial value, at least to the academic world; the present survey, incomplete and unsatisfactory from many points of view, may at least serve as a point of departure for later enlargements and improvements. I am indebted to many correspondents for assistance in gathering the materials on which it is based; and I acknowledge my gratitude to them, without implicating them in the result.

Administrative Reorganization. Although the movement for reorganization of public administration has slowed down, significant steps were taken in 1927. Two large-scale state reorganizations were effected, in California and Virginia, the latter following a careful survey by the National Institute of Public Administration.

In California the bulk of the state work is consolidated in nine departments, the directors of which comprise the governor's council. This is an interesting legal reconstruction of the governor's council inherited from the eighteenth century in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. The department of finance (Chap. 251) is given general powers of supervision over all matters concerning financial and business policies of the state, including specifically authority to audit, to visit and inspect institutions, and with the governor to authorize expenditures in excess of appropriations.

It must be apparent to all thoughtful readers of American newspapers that Washington has become the great national news center, perhaps the greatest single news center in all the world. This has come about partly through an ever increasing centralization of power in the federal government, power that extends in a direct line to every basic industry in the nation as well as to our political, our cultural, and our social relations. Also it has come about, in part, through the movement to Washington of literally hundreds of national and international organizations.

Practically every interest in our life as a nation responds in a degree to the activities and vibrations of some agency of the government. These interests, either consciously or unconsciously, have learned to listen for their master's voice in Washington. The great banking and credit system, for example, looks to the Federal Reserve Board for its inspiration. Wall Street, sometimes regarded as a sort of super-government, is reacting more and more to federal orders, decrees, or mere gestures. The railroads bend to the will of the Interstate Commerce Commission; the mercantile marine to that of the Shipping Board. Agriculture seeks its paneceas at the hands of Congress. Organized labor lives side by side with that body. Education is yielding to federal supervision, as is highway construction, water-power development, scientific research, foreign trade, commercial practices, and a score of other interests, great or small. There was a time when the federal government concerned itself primarily with the national defense, delivery of the mails, maintenance of navigable rivers and harbors, enforcement of federal statutes, guardianship of the Indians, currency, payment of pensions, control of public lands, and a few minor matters. But that time has passed; indeed, it is almost forgotten.

Special Session—Power to Propose Constitutional Amendments Not Included in Governor's Call. In 1926 a special session of the Pennsylvania legislature proposed an amendment to the state constitution in the form of a new section, although the subject-matter of this amendment was not referred to in the governor's proclamation calling the session. In a taxpayer's action to prevent the submission to the people of this proposal it was alleged that the proceeding was in violation of Art. 3, Sec. 25, of the constitution of Pennsylvania, which provides: “When the General Assembly shall be convened in special session, there shall be no legislation upon subjects other than those designated in the proclamation of the governor calling such session.” In Sweeney v. King the state supreme court held that a resolution proposing a constitutional amendment is not “legislation” within the meaning of this clause. In reaching this conclusion it relied heavily upon its earlier decision in Commonwealth v. Griest in which it had held that a constitutional amendment is not “legislation” which must be submitted to the chief executive for his approval, a doctrine well established both in state and federal courts. An opposite result on the principal question was reached by the supreme court of California in People v. Curry. Here the restriction upon a called session of the legislature was held to preclude the proposal of a constitutional amendment. The purpose of the restriction was declared to be to regulate the duration of the session and keep down expenses, and this purpose, it was held, ought not to be defeated by a strained or highly technical interpretation.

The most conspicuous constitutional decision rendered by the Supreme Court during its 1926 term, or for many a preceding term, was in the case of Myers v. United States. It is here held that the power of the President to remove executive officers appointed by him with the consent of the Senate cannot be restricted by Congress. On the question of the removal of such officers the Constitution is entirely silent. It is an interesting commentary on the process by which we make constitutional law that a problem as important as this, a problem which was debated at length in 1789, upon which presidents have acted and congresses have passed statutes, should now, after 137 years, be definitely settled for the first time, and be settled now only because the late Mr. Myers saw fit to sue the government in the Court of Claims for his salary.

The facts in the case are simple. In 1917 President Wilson appointed Myers to a first-class postmastership at Portland, Oregon, for a term of four years. In 1920, by direction of the President, he was removed from office. A statute passed in 1876 and still in force provides that “postmasters of the first, second, and third classes shall be appointed and may be removed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and shall hold their offices for four years unless sooner removed or suspended according to law.” The removal of Myers was never referred to the Senate for its consent.