Ever since the inquisitive age in which Voltaire wrote his Philosophic Dictionary, reflection upon the course of human events has caused scholars to persist in the search for a rational interpretation of history. They have not been discouraged by the skepticism of historians who, like Froude, have argued that the address of history must be less to the understanding than to the higher emotions. “A science of history,” according to this historian, “implies that the relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as in all others; that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which are palpable and ponderable.” Froude believed that “natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralized by what is called volition,” and that in consequence “the word Science is out of place” in connection with the study of history. If, as Froude intimated, the origin of human actions can be found only in mysterious properties of the mind, the outlook for a rational interpretation of history may well be poor.

Crises in political synthesis are not without precedent. They must have occurred from time to time since the emergence of coherent political society. Indeed, any sharp divergence between commonly accepted ethical standards and temporal conditions is likely to produce a crisis in régimes. The last great debate in the West on the destiny of politics occurred in the later years of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries. The issue was formulated in terms of the basis of authority, just as it is at the present time. At that time, liberalism, with its uncertain conception of political organization, faced the old and tried historical authorities founded on the feudal and the divine conceptions of earthly power. Such men as Edmund Burke, von Haller, and the thinkers of the German historical school fought their losing battle against the tides in liberalism which seemed to them most pernicious. The new capitalism gathered into its fold the hunger for liberty and for the destruction of the arbitrary in government, but our crisis today rests on the fact that this capitalism and its multitudinous social implications are, in the minds of many, becoming unequal to the task of running the world as it is.

It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration. It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is so much in it that sounds modern, so much that will hold permanently true. “It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.” Was this said only yesterday? No, Woodrow Wilson clearly saw the importance of governmental administration half a century ago. “Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself.” Yet democracies have badly neglected administrative principles and structural improvements. “Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in stature, but has also become awkward in movement. … English and American political history has been a history, not of administrative development, but of legislative oversight—not of progress in governmental organization, but of advance in law-making and political criticism. … We go on criticising when we ought to be creating.”

Within recent months, increased attention has been given the possibility of utilizing interstate compacts to cope with problems that transcend the boundary lines of given states. A Council of State Governments has been created to promote such interstate agreements, and several states have established commissions to facilitate coöperation with this council. Compacts have been advocated as solutions not only for the problem of criminal extradition, but also for such problems as the control of the extraction of natural resources (e.g., coal, oil, gas, water supplies, and water power) and the conservation of their supply, and the regulation of milk prices, of the conditions of labor, and of the production and distribution of the services of certain classes of public utilities.

In 1890, Mr. Edward C. Mason published in his monograph, The Veto Power, the results of his investigation of presidential vetoes down to 1889. In the present note, it is proposed to supplement the earlier study by presenting a short analysis of vetoes between 1889 and 1934.

By 1889, the direct veto had been applied to 435 measures. Of this number, however, over 200 were pension bills vetoed during Cleveland's first administration. Of pocket vetoes, there had been only 16. From 1889 to the close of the Seventy-third Congress in June, 1934, the direct veto was exercised 235 times, and 292 pocket vetoes were recorded. In the hundred-year period from 1789 to 1889, 29 vetoes were overridden by Congress; in the 45 years from 1889 to 1934, 22 met reversal. This increase in the number and proportion of vetoes is attributable to the increased amount and broadened scope of legislation resulting from the complexity of our social and political life.

Taking note of the constantly increasing number of persons who were seeking nomination to public office in Wayne county, Michigan, a special election laws commission (1930) recommended a change in the laws governing the primary. The recommendation, accompanied by a draft of a bill, proposed to make it somewhat more difficult in that county for candidates to qualify for a place upon the primary ballots. The legislative response to this recommendation was an innocuous amendment providing for the deposit of a small filing fee as an alternative to the nominating petition. However, primary abuses during the depression years convinced the legislature that more drastic action was necessary, and in 1935 the election laws, as applied to Wayne county, were again amended abolishing the nominating petition and substituting the filing fee for “candidates for county office or office in the state legislature.” A similar provision was imposed by charter amendment for municipal offices in the city of Detroit.

The establishment of equitable rules whereby the constitutional rights of affected interests may be protected against arbitrary invasion from laws adopted by the electorate under the reserved legislative powers of the initiative and referendum remains the most important procedural question in the whole field of direct legislation. In reserving the authority to initiate constitutional and statutory measures without the approval or consent of the popular assembly, and to enact such measures through the medium of a popular referendum, the popular sovereign has created a mechanic of legislation coördinate in authority with the legislature. But in erecting barriers against fraudulent and corrupt practices upon the part of those engaged in the initiation of proposed measures, the state constitutions and laws present the possibility of obstructionist tactics by opponents of the proposals and undue delay in the presentation of the measures to the electorates for decision. The recent political imbroglio in Oklahoma over the adoption of an old-age-pensions amendment to the state constitution emphasizes the difficulties of reconciling these conflicting interests.

In spite of the enormous literature on propaganda recently surveyed by a committee of the Social Science Research Council, there has not as yet emerged a generally accepted definition of propaganda. Consequently, any discussion in this field requires at the outset some statement or general indication of what one is dealing with, in order to reduce misunderstanding. As political scientists, we are taking a strictly pragmatic view of propaganda, as completely removed as possible from the area of psychological controversies. We have, for the purposes of our studies, considered only such propaganda as is manifested in the organized activities involved in efforts to get people to take a particular step, such as to vote for Roosevelt, or to abstain from objecting to a particular step, such as the United States’ entry into the World War. These efforts, when promotional, may be denominated “a propaganda campaign.” Such a campaign proceeds by the organized dissemination of propaganda appeals. But these same appeals can, and do, operate without any organized promotion; and still they tend to influence those whom they reach. Many different kinds of individuals carry these appeals—teachers, writers, gossips, etc. From the viewpoint of propaganda analysis, they may be called “propagandizers.” In the course of a typical campaign, there appear propagandizers who indulge in various activities which are significant in spite of their unorganized nature. Different is the propagandist who participates in a propaganda campaign.

The primary objective of a political propaganda campaign is to establish an attitude of mind, a climate of opinion. When such a campaign is successful, the point of view which it has created acts as a censor or interpreter of news. The anti-German attitude displayed by the American press between 1914 and 1917 was the result of such a campaign. It was not accidental, and it was not the result of guilt resting exclusively upon Germany.

In that revolutionary movement by which slowly and unobtrusively the government of England has been made over in the last twenty years, no institution has changed more perceptibly than the Church of England. Church and State: The Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Relations between Church and State, dated 1935 but withheld from the public by the Commission until after the general election of that year, sets forth the latest stage in a notable constitutional development.

Although there is a federal form of government in both the Dominion of Canada and the United States, there are striking differences in the two types of federalism. Some of these differences are to be found in fundamentals, such as the basis upon which the powers of government are divided in the two countries. Less striking, but nevertheless significant, are still other points of variance. Among these is the power which the dominion government has to disallow legislative acts of the provinces. Just why the fathers of the Canadian federation thought this power should be given to the central government is not clear. The fact remains, however, that in the years from 1867 to 1935, at least 114 provincial acts and territorial ordinances were set aside. It is important to note that these acts were disallowed by executive officers of the dominion government. Executive officers of the national government in the United States do not possess similar powers where state legislation is concerned.

Every twelve years, the parliamentary elections in Sweden, which take place quadrennially, and those in Norway, which occur triennially, fall within a few weeks of each other. In 1936, spirited contests in these two Scandinavian countries (September 21 in Sweden and October 19 in Norway) culminated in gains in each case for the workers' parties. The workers' parties of these two contiguous democracies have much in common. Both are moderately socialistic, and both are believers in the democratic parliamentary system of government. The official title of the Norwegian party is Labor, while that of the Swedish is Social Democrat.

The neutrality legislation enacted at Washington in 1935 was admittedly a compromise, satisfying neither the President, who in his statement upon signing the joint resolution, again criticized its mandatory feature as potentially dangerous, nor many of those in and out of Congress who wanted some definition of our relation to war. As if to point the moral, the Italo-Ethiopian conflict flamed into what the President was pleased to call “a state of war,” and some of the very issues which the legislation was intended to meet became acute. More recently, civil war in Spain has tragically illuminated new issues in our position and policy.