Home rule in the United States has for many years been confined to the states west of the Mississippi. As late as 1920 Ohio and Michigan were the only eastern states giving their cities autonomy. Since that date, however, there has appeared a tendency in the larger urban industrial states to treat cities more generously. New York in 1923 and Pennsylvania in 1924 have now joined the ranks of home-rule states. But many of the largest states, for example, Illinois, still give no such power to their municipalities, while in Massachusetts it can still be said that cities have the same legal status as “an infant, an idiot or a lunatic.”

The addition of New York to this group has just been rendered certain. On September 2, the court of appeals of the state rendered a unanimous decision declaring the home-rule amendment to have been validly adopted. This ended two months of uncertainty caused by the decision of the appellate division of the supreme court in New York City that the home-rule amendment was not validly a part of the constitution and that all state and local legislation passed under its aegis was void.

While it is true that every writer on politics has been to some degree an observer of psychological facts, the significance of this has never been so apparent to systematic students as it is today; otherwise, writings of considerable merit in political psychology could scarcely have suffered the fate of the two books referred to in the present study and have disappeared from sight. Dr. J. G. Zimmerman's Essay on National Pride, published at Zürich in 1758, might very well have been the point of departure for extended research into the nature of patriotism and international attitudes; Gottfried Duden's inquiry, Concerning the Essential Differences of States and the Motives of Human Nature, published at Cologne in 1822, stated problems and suggested methods for the examination of the realities of political power which ought to have inspired a century of minute research. Both books fell flat, and it is only in this day of numerous soundings in psychological politics that it has become worthwhile to disinter them.

That a book about national pride should have been published two years after the beginning of the Seven Years' War is a sharp reminder that European politics had undergone a transformation. The Reformation was undoubtedly a nationalist movement in many of its phases, but it introduced a series of sectional and party disturbances which intercepted the progress of nationalism. These had subsided, and by the eighteenth century the clash of competing imperialisms became not only a basic fact but a fact of which the men of the age were aware.

The fundamental problem in politics is that of the balance of power. It is a balance which has to be struck not only in foreign affairs but, quite as much, in the domestic management of states. Only, it may be suggested, when real equilibrium has been secured, is that efficient, smooth and healthy working of the social system possible which finds external expression in a normal and resilient form of conservatism as distinct from the tetanus of the morbid and hysterical form. But it is futile to speak of striking a balance of social interests unless we are justified in supposing that the units have a certain constancy of characteristics and persistence of activity.

Now the units of social force are, in the last analysis, the so-called ‘free wills’ of the individuals necessarily brought into contact as component members of a society. The contact is necessary: civilization admits of no ‘wild ass freedom.’ To assert that these ‘persons with a will of their own’ behave in accordance not only with an ‘altruistic’ gregarious tendency but also with a differentiating, assertive tendency, is to make a psychological assumption. To affirm that this self-assertive tendency may perhaps be religiously sublimated but that it is under all circumstances inextinguishable, is to make another psychological assumption.

Terms denoting political attitudes, such as ‘conservative,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘reactionary,’ have long been familiar both in popular usage and in the language of political science. Though sufficiently understood for ordinary discourse, their use is likely to lead to a confusion between a political opinion and the type of person who holds the opinion. There is considerable agreement as to what is meant by a radical view; but is there such a thing as a radical type of personality? If there is, we need a method for the measurement and identification of such individuals. If not (and psychologists are becoming increasingly suspicious of type classifications), we must ask what psychological characteristics in individuals are the most likely to produce a radical trend in political and social convictions. The same observation holds for the other familiar attitudes upon public questions.

A logical procedure would seem to be, first, to measure the distribution of public opinion in a representative sample, and secondly, to select from the various regions of this distribution (conservative, radical, and the like) a sufficient number of individuals for detailed study of the motives and traits of their personalities which give rise to the opinions they hold. This paper will be devoted to a preliminary report on the results of such a study.

The Sixty-eighth Congress had only two sessions. Not since the Sixty-fourth Congress (1915–17) had members enjoyed such lengthy vacations, for, of the Congresses since 1900, seven have had special sessions. This now seems to be the rule rather than the exception, so numerous and technical are the problems that confront the national legislature.

The President and Congress. Four months before the Congress met, Mr. Harding died and Mr. Coolidge succeeded to the Presidency. The first session ran its course under the shadow of the approaching Presidential election.