For the first time since its sessions began in 1904, the American Political Science Association was last year unable to hold its regular annual meeting. For fourteen years, in unbroken series, the association had brought its members together for conference and discussion; but last year, with more matter in its field engaging thought and provoking study than ever before, the association had to suspend its activities. This was due to circumstances so well known that the matter would be scarcely worth mentioning were it not that it exhibits a plight in which political science is apt to find itself whenever the ordinary course of events is interrupted by some great catastrophe.

In President Lowell's standard work on Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, he remarks that to him “the State sometimes presents itself under the figure of a stage-coach with the horses running away. On the front a number of eager men are urging the most contrary advice on the driver, whose chief object is to keep his seat; while at the back a couple of old gentlemen with spy-glasses are carefully surveying the road already traversed.”

On October 15, 1919, a press dispatch from Buffalo, New York, indicated that the primary election returns in that city gave an average of about three hundred votes to the three candidates whose names appeared on the ballot as representatives of the Communist party, the protagonist of the soviet form of government in the United States. The total number of votes cast was 54,000, which shows that the Communist vote was insignificant, numerically. Newspapers ridiculed the diminutive radical vote. All phenomena have a genesis, and it is the fact that a Communist ballot was cast rather than the quantitative character of the vote that has significance for the student of political philosophy and action. To those who saw the revolutionary left wing of the old Socialist party organize the Communist party and the Communist Labor party in Chicago during the first week of September, 1919, this initial appearance of the revolutionary Communists in American political life presages important developments. The event was heralded by revolutionists in this country and in Europe as the emergence of a new era in the political and economic life of the United States. The widespread dissemination of ultra-radical propaganda in connection with recent strikes is further evidence of the revolutionary purposes of Communists in America.

Optimistic prophecies are prevalent to the effect that bolshevism will find no fertile soil in the United States, since American workmen are too prosperous to become susceptible to revolutionary political and industrial philosophy. Similar predictions were voiced even on the floor of the Socialist emergency convention and the Communist Labor party convention last September.

To understand the real nature of the government which now, under its new constitution, is attempting to guide the German nation through the perils of reconstruction is indeed a baffling problem. We are as yet too close to the events which brought it into existence and clothed it with constitutional forms to attempt their evaluation or to determine their significance. The revolution was so unlike what we should have expected as necessary to shift the ultimate power in the state from a narrow military and landed oligarchy to the masses of the people, that a doubt forces itself upon us as to its genuineness. The war, with its shattering of national ideals, its appalling toll of life, the grinding misery which it imposed, and the insuperable financial bondage to which it condemned the nation for an indefinite future, might account for a thorough popular disillusionment which would sweep the nation into the current of democracy. But if this were the case, we would expect a general enthusiasm for the new government, an evident popular sense of the passing of the dark night of autocratic rule and a joy in the light of a new and happier day.

This is exactly what does not exist. There are three classes in Germany today. The first, who constitute only a small minority, are the nationalists and militarists who are bitterly opposed to the republic, and even now are agitating at every favorable opportunity for the restoration of the monarchy in its old form. The second class are likewise a comparatively small minority. They are the revolutionaries, the Spartacists with some of the Independent Socialists, who are just as strongly opposed to the government, using wherever possible the instruments of direct action to inaugurate the revolution which they believe has not yet been achieved. The vast mass of the nation appear to be utterly indifferent with respect to forms of government.

Several of the cases already considered under the commerce clause involved further questions under the Fourteenth Amendment. Georgia's misuse of the mileage ratio in applying the unit rule to the taxation of wandering cars was found so arbitrary as to violate the requirement of due process. The minority insisted that “the case presents no question of taxing a foreign corporation with respect to personal property that never has come within the borders of the state.” This was not specifically denied by the majority who seem to base their decision on excessive valuation of property within the jurisdiction rather than on taxation of property outside the jurisdiction. Yet in substance the case is one of taxing extra-state values though not extra-state tangible objects.

Missouri's excessive fee for certificates authorizing the issue of bonds secured by railroad property within the state, which was held an unconstitutional regulation of interstate commerce, was alleged by complainant to be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment as well. The opinion of the court did not pass on the due-process question, but the cases cited under the commerce clause relied also on the Fourteenth Amendment.

Problems left unsolved rather than measures which were passed are the noteworthy features of the special session of the Sixty-sixth Congress—from May 19 to November 19, 1919. The senate was almost exclusively occupied with the Peace Treaty, the session ending in a deadlock over the reservations to the League of Nations covenant; and the treaty, together with the Anglo-French-American alliance and the other agreements of the Paris Conference, went over to the regular session. The appropriation bills, a resolution submitting the woman suffrage amendment to the states, the repeal of daylight saving, and the prohibition enforcement law, constitute the most important legislation which was completed. The two latter measures were passed over the President's veto and evidenced a disposition on the part of Congress to reassert the authority which during the war had been limited by presidential control.

Unusual interest attaches to all of the continental elections of recent months—the first to be held after the long postponements caused by the war; but the elections in France derive special importance from the new electoral law of July 12, 1919, under which they were held.

After a nine-year contest, the elements which have demanded scrutin de liste, or election on a general departmental ticket, instead of scrutin d'arrondissement, or election by small districts, have come off victorious. Each of the two systems prevailed at various times during the Restoration, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire.

The elections to the upper chamber of the Swedish Riksdag, in July, 1919, cannot claim any large share of the world's attention. None the less, being the first parliamentary elections in any of the neutral European countries since the armistice, they have some interest as an indication of the political temper of the northern neutrals at the close of the war.