No serious consideration of the theory of democracy needs explanation or apology today. The scope and limitations of the present treatment of the subject, however, should be made clear at the outset. The object of this article is to deal with the political philosophy of democracy, or, more precisely, with attempts to ground democratic doctrine on first principles of right. Clearly this does not constitute a complete treatment of democratic theory. Such a treatment would have to deal, inter alia, with the practical operation of democratic processes under varying conditions. Probably the bulk of any full-length discussion of the theory of democracy should be devoted to such matters. Yet, essential though these considerations are, the problem with which this paper deals is of fundamental importance. For, in general, it may be said of all the “practical” arguments about democracy that whatever validity they have must depend upon some theory of ethics, upon some assumption as to the things that are valuable in this world. In other words, I shall not here concern myself with arguments that in practice democracy is less objectionable than other forms of government, because I feel the inadequacy of such arguments considered by themselves.

There are abundant controversial treatises bearing on Soviet-Nazi relationships, with their consequent effect on world power politics. The observations summarized herewith may shed light on recent developments, suggesting the cataclysm that today shakes the world.

(1) Mutual distrust on the part of the British and French governments on the one hand and the Soviet régime on the other, dating back to the Revolution of October 7, 1917. In a large measure, this is due to the fact that there have been, and there are now, active Communists and sympathizers in England and in the United States to propagandize the Soviets' point of view and to apologize for the faults of the Stalin régime. Conversely, there have never been, and there are not now, democratic agents and sympathizers at large in Soviet Russia to represent and interpret Western ideas of democracy either to the Russian people or to the Soviet leaders. There is a school of thought represented by distinguished scholars in America and England which contends that the Soviet overtures at Geneva looking toward disarmament were naively insincere. Ambassador Litvinov's personal motives were, however, beyond reproach.

For the first time in American history, the majority of the voters in the presidential election of 1944 will be women. That party managers have realized this fact has been evidenced by their special appeals to the feminine vote in campaign literature, public statements, and management techniques. Furthermore, in a growing number of cases, women have been entrusted with responsible functions in party organization which up to now have been reserved for men. To cite but one example in national party structure, there is the appointment for the first time of a woman to serve as secretary of the Democratic national committee.

The unusual political responsibilities and opportunities which war conditions have made available to women bring up the question of the progress they have been able to achieve in national party organization during the years since the adoption of the suffrage amendment in 1920. In 1933, an analysis of the formal status of women in the national party organizations was made by Miss Sophonisba Breckinridge, and included in her volume, Women in the Twentieth Century, published as one of a series of monographs on “Recent Social Trends in the United States,” under the direction of President Hoover's Research Committee on Social Trends. As a formal measure of women's status in national party organization, Miss Breckinridge examined their participation in the national conventions and their position on the national committees of both parties from 1892, when they were first represented in a convention, through 1932.

The present study carries Miss Breckinridge's investigation through the 1936, 1940, and 1944 nominating conventions. The data used in both studies were obtained from the official convention records and from replies of national committeewomen to questionnaires.

“The financing of government in the South presents an important field of study. The needs in relation to sources of revenue are greater in the South than in other parts of the nation. The South has relied heavily on the property tax to meet these needs, but it has also experimented widely with other forms of taxation. It has depended on federal grants to a great extent, though it has had difficulty in meeting certain conditions set up for some of these grants. The whole subject of government finance needs to be further studied and the experiences of the various states in the area need to be compared and contrasted. Materials will be found in state reports, in the reports of federal agencies which distribute grants-in-aid, and in the findings cf various groups which have studied the general problem, as, for example, the Advisory Committee on Education which reported to the President in 1939, and the Committee on Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations set up by the Department of the Treasury.”

Much of the foregoing comment by a group of Southern political scientists with special reference to the Southern region is equally applicable to states in other sections of the country. It has often been alleged that the American tax system, in so far as it may be called a system at all, is a survival of the horse-and-buggy age. The thousands of small local taxing jurisdictions existing throughout the country—some 165,000 of them—are striking evidence of our antiquated methods of levying and collecting taxes. In Pennsylvania alone—and many other states are in a worse condition—there are approximately 5,200 local units of government, half of them school districts, and all of them with the power to tax and to incur debt.

Looking at the post-war period, it seems obvious that the government of the United States will give more attention to foreign affairs than it has in any comparable period of American history. How can the machinery for conducting foreign relations best be organized to meet these increasing responsibilities?

The conduct of foreign relations in the modern world is no simple matter. Technical experts, intelligence systems, ability to negotiate, national political stability, a large and loyal staff of public servants—these are but some of the national requisites for effective participation in world affairs. The mobilization and organization of the best staff resources in the country, the negotiation of national policies, and then of international agreements, constitute a formidable task under any system of government.

The conduct of foreign relations is, of course, easiest in a completely authoritarian state. It is made immeasurably more difficult by any division of authority. In most non-authoritarian governments, some division of authority has been found desirable, even at the expense of occasional awkwardness of procedure, because thereby the dangers of usurpation of power are minimized. The United States has gone farther than any democratic country in dividing responsibility in foreign affairs. Not only is there the usual distinction between legislative and executive authority, but the independence of the two branches has been so far underlined that the achievement of over-all government policies (as distinct from legislative and executive policies) is extremely difficult unless the party relationships are just right between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Absorbed for three years in the grim business of global war, the American people only dimly understand what is involved in their apparent willingness to participate in the equally exacting business of organizing the world for enduring peace. If this participation is to be sustained and effective instead of short-lived or sporadic, the scope and forms of the future foreign policy of the United States cannot help being profoundly affected. Its context will be radically different from that of prewar times.

This observation does not imply any sharp departure from the fundamental postulates of policy enunciated year in and year out by Secretary Hull since 1933. The foreign policy of every great power is always more or less a continuum, compounded of old and new elements. Between wars we at least paid lip service to the ideal of a world organized for peace and security, though we persistently declined to assume the obligations of full membership in the League of Nations. We have for decades sponsored the development of a loose collaborative system designed to further Pan-American solidarity. At the world level, moreover, we have been an active participant in international agencies concerned with technical, scientific, social, and humanitarian matters, including, since 1934, the International Labor Organization. And in 1928 we joined with sixty-two other signatories of the Pact of Paris in renouncing “war as an instrument of national policy.”

Postwar American security planning will be realistic and adequate only to the extent that it is based upon a careful evaluation of the present and prospective relationship of the power position of the United States to that of the remainder of the world. In the past, it has been fashionable in this country to condemn power politics as something immoral, associated with the sinister contrivings of European diplomatists and not with the honest and above-board conduct of foreign relations by a democratic and peace-loving people. The term “power politics” has come to mean the cynical and ruthless use of power to advance national interests at the expense of others. But even though such a use—or abuse—of power is to be condemned, it does not follow that the power factor in international relations can be disregarded or even minimized. In practice, it will always be uppermost in the minds of statesmen, however much they say about the legal equality of all states, and the peoples of democratic countries need to be as fully aware of the constructive uses to which power may be put as to the misuse of which it is so freely susceptible.

While condemnation of power as a basis of policy has by no means disappeared from American thinking, there is a growing realization that we were able with impunity to minimize its importance in the past because of the existence of a particular set of circumstances which combined to provide us with adequate national security and which required little positive effort on our part. In other words, there is a new awareness of the fact that our favorable position with respect to security, which existed during the latter part of the nineteenth century and up to 1914, arose, not from moral superiority on our part or from the inherent excellence of our governmental system, but from other factors which had little or no relationship to these political or moral qualities.

There is a popular expectation in the United States that the peace settlement of the major United Nations will be as effectively and loyally executed by the United States as by Great Britain and Soviet Russia. This over-confidence of the American people in the prowess of their President is partly due to: (1) the successful conduct of the war, (2) the popular credence placed in the Chief Executive as national leader in time of war, (3) the immense personal prestige of President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and (4) the belief that, in case the November election should bring the Republican party into control of the White House, Governor Dewey would continue with vigor the Rooseveltian policy of full participation and leadership on the part of the United States.

A warning that the American Senate might shatter this peace settlement was sounded by Senators Arthur H. Vandenberg and Robert A. Taft and other somewhat isolation-minded Republicans in September, 1943, in the Mackinac Declaration. The “constitutionalism” proposed by this declaration meant nothing else than that the peace settlement must be in the form of a treaty which would require the consent of two-thirds of the members of the American Senate. Senators Vandenberg and Taft controlled the resolutions committee of the Republican national convention in July, 1944, with the result that the Republican platform concluded its proposal regarding the peace settlement with the following pronouncement: “Pursuant to the Constitution of the United States, any treaty or agreement to attain such [international] aims made on behalf of the United States with any other nation or association of nations, shall be made only by and with the advice and consent of the Senate of the United States provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”

With the military defeat of Germany now assured, it becomes imperative to complete plans for occupation of the country. There is apparent agreement among the United Nations that Germany must be occupied; but, although much work has been done on the subject, by both the military and political branches of the several Allied Governments, to date we have not had any general policy directives from the heads of the three great powers, namely, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. Presumably, at the Teheran conference Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin came to a preliminary meeting of minds with reference to the various aspects of the war against Germany. At the second Quebec conference, it may reasonably be assumed that the President and Mr. Churchill, keeping in close contact with the Soviet leader, finally came to some definite agreement regarding the measures necessary to encompass the complete defeat and occupation of Germany.

It has been generally agreed all around that Germany must be occupied by the troops of the Allied Nations, but many of the specific details of such an occupation have not yet been thought through. When we speak of the occupation of Germany, we must first of all define exactly what we mean by the term Germany. It is expected that “Germany” will be understood to cover only those territories included within the Republic prior to Hitler's accession to power. It might be better to agree that the boundaries shall be understood to be those of January 1, 1932.

In discussing the problems of military government, some writers have recalled critically the fact that in 1918 the armies of occupation did not coöperate with the workers' and soldiers' councils in Germany. Did this really mean that the commanding officers hampered Germany's transition from a half-absolutist monarchy to a democratic republic? What was the position of the workers' and soldiers' councils in the total population? How did the occupation armies act toward the democratic movements in Germany? As one of the leaders of the revolution against the Emperor, and as a close observer of the foreign armies in my home province, the Rhineland, I may be justified in presenting some facts and experiences.

When on November 11 I read in Paragraph V of the armistice agreement that “the left bank of the Rhine shall be administered by the local authorities under the control of the troops of occupation,” I informed my friends in the Cologne workers' and soldiers' council that this undoubtedly meant the end of that council on the day of the arrival of the foreign troops. It was clear that we were no “local authorities.” Nowhere had the councils replaced the civil servant administration of the former régime. Why not? Simply because the social-democratic labor movement, which alone backed the councils, was in most places, on the left bank of the Rhine, a small minority. Only by using terror against a large majority of the population could we have eliminated the existing civil servant administration. Such terror was against the democratic principles and traditions of our movement. Incidentally, even the wildest radicals knew in those days of threatening chaos that a sudden break-up of a centuries-old civil servant administration would mean grave disaster, especially in shipping the necessary supplies to the exhausted population.

In the past year and a half, first steps have been taken toward the building up of a community of the parliamentarians of the English-speaking peoples. The development in the past thirty-two years of a community of the parliamentarians of the British Commonwealth to the point where it has become a central institution of the Commonwealth was dealt with in a previous article.

A Shrine of Family Reunion. Those who were present in the Canadian House of Commons at Ottawa on June 26, 1943, at the first conference between a duly appointed delegation from both houses of the American Congress and delegations from the Parliaments of the British Commonwealth felt that they were witnessing an important event; it was a development, they believed, which might prove hardly less important in history than the obscure first meetings of knights of the shire and burgesses out of which parliamentary institutions emerged in the thirteenth century. A remark in the last moments of the Conference by Mr. Sol Bloom, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States House of Representatives, expressed this feeling. He spoke of the room as “a shrine of family reunion”; the thought had come to him, he said, that this room in which this historic first conference had been held should be made a shrine, for within those four walls ideas had come forth that day that should lay everlasting foundations for the future of the peoples of the world.