Although the Naval Conference which met at London, December 4, 1908, grew out of the Second Peace Conference it differed from the latter both in its composition and its object.

In an historic session at the Hague, in June 1907, Germany and England proposed to the powers assembled to establish an international prize court. The two projects were referred to the first commission, and by the latter to a subcommission, which again appointed a committee of three, (Renault of France, Kriege of Germany, and Crowe of Great Britain) to combine them and draw up a project for submission to the commission.

It is hard to realize the significance of the work of those three jurists, each as familiar with the practical transaction of international business as with the theory and underlying principles of international law. To them, primarily, is due the elaboration of the convention for the establishment of an international prize court. Nor should we forget that the American delegation at the Hague gave the project its vigorous support, so that it was presented to the conference in the name of four of the greatest maritime powers.

Whether or no it be true, as someone has said, that with words we govern men, it is at least certain that when a name has once passed into common speech it becomes a fact and a power. The term Political Science seems now generally accepted and your Association has by its very title expressed the opinion that Politics is a science. Nevertheless, to prevent misconception, we may properly ask “What sort of a science is it?” The mathematical sciences are described as exact sciences: and so too are such departments of knowledge as mechanics and physics. The laws and conclusions of these sciences can be expressed in precise terms. They can be stated in numbers. As the facts which these sciences deal with are the same everywhere and at all times, so the relations of those facts which we call Laws are of universal application. That being so we can predict their action and rely upon them to be the same in the future as they have been in the past.

It is not surprising that the procedure of the American house of representatives should be subject to frequent outbreaks of criticism. The house is the organ which voices the immediate wishes of eighty millions of very active people, who are not the least of humanity in their desire to have what they want. As they usually do not agree as to what they want, and as what they shall have must be determined by a majority of their representatives, there must necessarily be from time to time large minorities of dissatisfied persons. Some of these will, according to the laws of human nature, complain of the processes by which the representatives have attained the result. Just at present we are witnessing an active recurrence of this criticism, accompanied by some interesting prescriptions for alleged troubles. Whether or not the troubles exist and the nature of the proposed remedies are important subjects for examination.

At the outset it is necessary to inquire as to the exact relations of the house of representatives to our form of government. This will sweep away some of the plausible but very superficial theories of those who conceive it a disadvantage that our speakership should differ from the speakership of the house of commons, and who seem to think that our house might easily be directed in its procedure by the president's cabinet, as the house of commons is directed by the mininstry of the crown. We are told with great jauntiness that in the early years of the republic the speaker of the house was simply a presiding officer like the speaker of the house of commons, and not at all a political leader.

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.

Frequent, emphatic, and apparently unanimous for many years, have been the complaints that there is too great an output of statutory law by the fifty-odd legislative bodies within the sovereignty of the United States. No less widespread are the charges that the majority of these statutes are unwise, ill-digested and badly drawn. Rarely, however, does one hear a remedy suggested, nor are the causes of these evils often subjected to analysis. The newspapers, to be sure, with their admirable capacity for passing judgment on all things at a moment's notice, without need of the slow process by which other people must arrive at conclusions, have long ago found both the cause and the cure. It would seem, according to most of them, that the cause is found in the preternatural wickedness and incapacity of the men elected to legislatures; while the remedy appears to lie in having just as few sessions as possible, and having the members hurry through their task with the greatest speed that is physically attainable. The public, having no other means of information, reflect the reportorial wisdom.

This paper proposes to show that the true cause of the evil is found in the constitution and methods of our legislative bodies, by which a thorough discussion of proposed legislation, and a proper sifting of worthy bills out of the chaff, are made exceedingly difficult. If the cause is clearly understood, a point of vantage will have been gained from which reforms can be undertaken with reasonable hope of success.

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.

In the public life of modern states, political and economic motives of action are so closely interwoven that the student of politics rarely encounters a situation or institution in which he can trace and study purely political principles. Indeed, the struggle for political power and for recognized authority, the effort to give the stamp of public sanction to this or that policy, is always the focus of public life; but the action of the participants in the political drama is determined largely by non-political motives. We have to go back to the Athenean republic or to the Whig rule in eighteenth century England to see the political factor in its clearest and most detached manifestations. It is there that we see a society highly capable and cultivated, concentrating all its attention upon that dramatic struggle for power, that attempt to gain leadership over other men by ascendancy in counsel, which form the true essence of politics. Among modern nations, with their democratic organization, with vast material interests clamoring for attention, purely political considerations are apt to be overshadowed by those of economic and social import, although it always remains interesting to compare and measure nations with regard to their ability to express and deal with the principles of their life in the forms and activities of political counsel.

In 1905 the storm-center of European politics shifted definitely to Morocco, and from the Moroccan situation resulted a new alignment of the powers based primarily upon the political necessity of France.

To comprehend the North African situation and its relation to European politics we must understand that upon the future of Morocco depends the future of a French colonial empire approximately the size of Europe.

In his preface to the Voyages au Maroc of de Segonzac, Eugene Etienne, Député d'Oran, Vice-President de la Chambre des Députés, Président du Comité du Maroc, says, “Il est de toute évidence que de la solution qui sera donnée a la question Marocaine dépend l'avenir même de notre pays. Il ne s'agit pas ici d'un de ces territoires plus ou moins riches, plus ou moins désirables, au sujet desquels les transactions et les partages sont possibles. Les énormes sacrifices que nous avons faits en Algérie et en Tunisie peuvent se trouver annulés si la solution qui intervient n'est pas conforme a nos intérêts et à nos droits. Ces droits, a la fois historiques et vivants, nous les tenons de Bugeaud et de Lamoricière, de notre armee d'Afrique et de nos colons d'Algérie. Quelle puissance européenne pourrait en présenter de semblables?”

The close of the war with Spain in 1898 and the cession of the Philippines to the United States brought to this country a number of serious and difficult problems in the islands other than those immediately connected with the exercise of governmental control over them. Not the least among these problems was that which concerned the presence of the Chinese and the question as to their future admission or exclusion from the islands. An attempted solution was reached in the extension to the islands in September, 1899, of the exclusion laws of the United States. These laws are based upon the limited treaties of 1880 and of 1894, both of which modified the general treaty of 1868. The latter treaty provides for the free admission of Americans to China and also for the unrestricted entrance of the Chinese to the United States. At the time of the agitation against the incoming of the Chinese in the seventies, negotiations were commenced with China which in the treaty of 1880 secured her consent for a limited suspension of the admission rights of the Chinese to the United States. A similar concession was obtained from China in 1894, limited to ten years in its operation. Since the expiration of this treaty China has claimed that the provisions of the treaty of 1868 obtained, while the United States has contended that the treaties of 1880 and of 1894 abrogated the rights of the Chinese to free admission to United States territory. This contention of the United States is obviously forced and without sufficient basis either in theory or in fact, and the interpretation is maintained solely because of the weakness of China and her inability to prevent the United States from ignoring her protests. This attitude of inattention would hardly be assumed toward a more able and aggressive nation.

In the contest of the western powers of Europe to colonize the New World, France, owing to a mistaken policy, failed completely and saw her flag and sovereignty practically driven back from this hemisphere. The early attempts of Admiral de Coligny to colonize the Huguenots first in Brazil and then in Florida, were, owing to the indifference and even opposition of the French crown, abortive. And in the later effort of the French crown to colonize in Canada and Louisiana, the attempt to bring over the remains of feudalism as opposed to the strong individualism that characterized the English settlers, reinforced by the Hollanders in New Netherlands, the Swedes and the Germans in Pennsylvania, and the Huguenots in Virginia and the Carolinas, doomed the French settlers, in the valley of the Saint Lawrence and at the mouth of the Mississippi, to defeat in their effort to extend their language and supremacy over the continent of North America.

There is perhaps no phase of the American race problem which has been discussed quite so much within the last decade as the Jim Crow laws; that is, the statutes requiring separate accommodations for white and colored passengers in public conveyances. This has been the case largely because these legislative enactments are of general concern, while the other legal distinctions have directly affected only certain classes of either race. For instance, the laws prohibiting intermarriage concern only those of marriageable age; the suffrage qualifications apply only to males of voting age: the statutes requiring separate schools immediately affect only children and youths. But the laws requiring white and colored passengers to occupy separate seats of compartments or coaches concern every man, woman, and child, who travels, the country over. They affect not only those living in the States where the laws are in force, but the entire traveling public. The white man or the colored man in Massachusetts may not care anything about the suffrage restrictions of South Carolina, but, if he travels through the South, he must experience the requirements of the Jim Crow laws.

Inasmuch, then, as these statutes are of such general concern, it is proper that the people should know where they are, what they are, and the means of their execution. It is not the purpose of this article to take sides and discuss the justice or injustice of the laws, or the partiality or the impartiality of their execution, but rather to examine the provisions of the laws, and, so far as may be, to summarize the court decisions upon the different sections of the laws.

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.