Any civilization may be reduced to two factors, a system of institutions and a system of ideas. By institutions we merely mean collective behavior patterns, the ways in which a community carries on the innumerable activities of social life. The church, the market, the family, the learned society, the trade union, the university, are examples of institutions. We often attribute a personality to such behavior patterns, clothe them with the attributes of a personal will, mind, and purpose; but such attribution is sheer fiction, the product of a purely imaginative process. Institutions are merely behavior patterns—they are nothing else. Government is an institution or a set of institutions. Society achieves certain results through collective political action. The means that it uses are the behavior patterns which we call courts, legislative bodies, commissions, electorates, administration. We idealize these institutions collectively and personify them in the State. But this idealization is pure fancy. The State as a juristic or ideal person is the veriest fiction. It is real only as a collective name for governmental institutions.

President Coolidge's appointment of William E. Humphrey to the Federal Trade Commission in 1925 served not only to establish a Republican majority on that body, but also to inaugurate a “new era” in its activities. Humphrey entered upon his duties on February 25, and on March 17 sweeping changes in policy and procedure were announced. No longer was the Commission to be used as a “publicity bureau to spread socialistic propaganda.” The opposition from the “vocal and beatific fringe, the pink edges that border both of the old parties,” would not deter the new Commission from its determination to “help business to help itself.” In his effort to stress the fact that a new course was being pursued, Humphrey emphatically condemned the Commission of his predecessors. “Under the old policy of litigation it became an instrument of oppression and disturbance and injury instead of a help to business. It harassed and annoyed business instead of assisting it. Business soon regarded the Commission with distrust and fear and suspicion—as an enemy. There was no coöperation between the Commission and business. Business wanted the Commission abolished, and the Commission regarded business as generally dishonest.”

Following the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, the state of Ohio authorized by statute the creation of a state liquor monopoly, purchased $4,500,000 worth of liquor, and perfected plans for the retailing of it through 187 stores owned and managed by the state. In Ohio v. Helvering, the state sought an injunction to restrain the commissioner of internal revenue from collecting from the state the customary federal excise taxes upon the sale of intoxicating liquors. It alleged the immunity of the state and its instrumentalities from federal taxation and further claimed that the federal taxing statutes were not intended by Congress to apply to the states. The court, speaking through Mr. Justice Sutherland, upheld the collection of the tax, reaffirming the doctrine laid down in 1905 in the South Carolina Dispensary Case. The immunity from federal taxation enjoyed by the states extends only to those agencies and functions which are governmental in character and not to those which are proprietary. “When a state enters the market place seeking customers, it divests itself of its quasi-sovereignty pro tanto, and takes on the character of a trader, so far, at least, as the taxing power of the federal government is concerned.” The Court rejected as “altogether fanciful” the argument that the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and its later repeal had so altered the status of the liquor traffic that its conduct by the state has become an exercise of the state's police power, and hence a governmental operation immune from federal taxation.

It is curious that the question with which, of all others, every participant in local politics finds himself most persistently confronted—and it is a truism that by far the greatest part of our political lives are concerned with local affairs—should be given so little. attention in treatises on American government. I refer to the problem of the relation between national political parties and state and local politics.

The problem presents itself under two aspects, in one sense separate, though in reality closely interwoven with each other. There is first the anomaly that local issues seem so far removed from the platforms of the organizations, the national parties, through which the often perplexed and embarrassed voter must express himself in the performance of his ordinary electoral duties in the state or the locality; and there is, secondly, the question faced by every would-be reformer of local government, as to whether the desired reforms can best be brought about through the national party organizations or through separate locally organized groups.

In the December, 1933, issue of the Review, pp. 942–955, appeared a tabular review of the changes in major units of the national government between March 4 and November 1, 1933. In the April, 1934, issue, pp. 250-254, appeared a supplementary list showing the changes between November 1, 1933, and March 1, 1934. In the October, 1934, issue, pp. 872–874, a second supplementary list showed the changes between March 1 and June 30, 1934. The present list indicates the reorganization effected and new units created between June 30 and December 15, 1934. As in previous lists, mention is made of units only specifically authorized by law or established by the President under general authority vested in him.

The Stavisky affair in France was, it would now seem, one of those national crises with which students of French politics are familiar. In cases of the kind, a chronic condition becomes acute. A latent anti-democratic sentiment and a dormant antiparliamentary movement appear to become suddenly aroused. A concatenation of apparently superficial circumstances causes an emergency to exist.

The many persons who, like M. Charles Benoist for example, have for a long time insisted that the inevitable ultimate outcome for a system suffering from a chronic condition marked by periodic crises must be revolution, dictatorship, or reform seemed in February of 1934 to be supported by unusually important facts. In conditions such that anticipation of revolution or dictatorship was prevalent on an exceedingly large scale, M. Doumergue assumed power, as is well known, with the definite understanding that he would direct his efforts seriously and unconditionally towards reform.

Although the ultimate form of the National Socialist political system in Germany is not yet clear, certain institutions are emerging which bid fair to make more than a passing claim to perdurance in that system. Among these, surprisingly enough, is the popular referendum. Apparently doomed to obsolescence towards the end of the republican period because it was proving to be superfluous in a representative régime and too radically democratic, it has suddenly been accepted as a leading constitutional practice in a Germany which is dedicated to the extirpation of political democracy. In somewhat more than ten months, the Hitler cabinet has twice requested and received popular verdicts at the polls, a record of nation-wide popular consultations which is exactly equivalent to that of the fourteen years of the Republic.