The Need for Factually Defined Concepts. Most political utterance is necessarily normative in import since it occurs in the process of motivating human behavior. Popularly employed political concepts, appropriately, are frequently of the ideal type in that they tend to denote an hypothetical situation toward conformance with which actual human institutions are being impelled. Ask any student to define a state or a government and he is almost certain to bring in some such notion as “operation in the public interest,” which might or might not be judged applicable to an actual situation. It is safe to say that ninety per cent of the time such concepts as state, government, court, law, administration, political party, and many others are used in this normative sense, not only popularly but in learned circles.

Without desiring the exclusion of the normative from the social sciences, the writer believes that rigid conceptual clarity in distinguishing norm and fact is necessary for the progress of these disciplines. To attain this goal, the technical requisite is a system of concepts having an understood reference of a purely factual character. The absence of such factually defined concepts is noteworthy in political science, and largely unrecognized. Although most of our studies are factual in nature and the intended reference of concepts is usually factual, definition is largely subconscious and when brought to the surface is likely to have normative form, particularly a form borrowed from legal norms.

True definition is appropriate in such disciplines as logic and mathematics and in physics, which has attained since the seventeenth century to the explanation of phenomena by hypothetical systems employing purely postulated entities like electrons and atoms. A set of pure definitions gives postulates from which theorems are derived by rigid deduction. What is put into the definitions comes out in the theorems.

Literature which has accumulated during three years since the surrender of Japan has not yet encompassed a consideration of the administrative process of military government at the local level. That the function of local military government units as the field service of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) has been overlooked is to be explained principally by the dramatic character and impressive scope of the functions of MacArthur's headquarters and the resulting eclipse of local activities necessarily of a more prosaic nature. Moreover, in neglecting the local levels of administration, analysts have reflected a prevalent American conception of central-field relationships, a conception which implies that the importance of administrative activity diminishes as it descends from level to level.

The presence of nearly two thousand military government personnel in the 46 prefectures makes evident the inadequacy of a critique of the occupation based solely on the functions of SCAP. It is this group of field service administrators who, living close to the citizenry, have daily contact with native government officials and are in an unparalleled position to impress the Japanese with the quality of American administration. The close relationship which inheres at this level subjects American administration to careful scrutiny and will be of no little importance in judging the final success of the occupation. Poor official performance or disreputable personal conduct is not as easily concealed by small detachments in the field as by large headquarters in metropolitan areas. Neither the headquarters personnel living in large Americanized compounds and working in modern office buildings nor tactical forces isolated in cantonment areas have the same intimate responsibility and contact with Japanese officialdom.

There were no changes in the personnel of the Court during the 1947 term. The former Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes, Avho had retired from the Court on July 1, 1941, died on August 27, 1948. Justice Hughes had served on the Court from May 2, 1910, to June 10, 1916, and was appointed Chief Justice on February 13,1930, succeeding William Howard Taft. In characteristic fashion, the justices filed during the 1947 term a very large number of dissenting and concurring opinions liberally salted with spirited and often bitter judicial invective.

The general problem of party membership in the United States was examined to some extent in an earlier article in this Review, and out of that study certain implications could be noted with respect to the nature and operation of our two-party system. It was assumed, to begin with, that it is important in any party system “to bring together those persons, and only those persons, who adhere to the respective party principles,” and particularly important to do that in a two-party system, “where the principles and issues are presumably sharply denned and clearly distinguishable.” The extended survey of the trends in legislation and in party practice led to the conclusion that there is still need for “some better definition or understanding of what is meant by a loyal Republican and a loyal Democrat,” that the lack of such definition is at least partially responsible for the loose and irresponsible nature of the party organizations, for the mass of glittering generalities in party platforms, and for the failure to offer the voter anything like clear alternative programs. “Somehow or other, it should be possible to have a party system which would make it clear whether Wendell Willkie or Senator Nye is the better Republican, whether Franklin D. Roosevelt or Senator Wheeler is the better Democrat.”

Some day, if and when the files of recollection left by Charles E. Hughes are open to research and discussion, it may be entirely clear how it happened. I am quite sure such memoirs exist, for only a year or two ago Mr. Hughes told me at his home in Washington that he would never write an autobiography, but intended to leave a record of his public activities in such form that it would be available to those who could make good use of it in the future. We had a good laugh that day over the disparity of the actual facts and the public understanding about them in some instances with which we were both familiar, as far back as the very controversial days of the Hughes governorship of New York State.

It must be confessed that, outside the inner circles of the administration, people in Great Britain show little interest in their civil service. It is taken for granted by the majority and used as an Aunt Sally by a considerable minority to whom the merest suspicion of that much overworked epithet, “bureaucrat,” acts as a red rag to a bull. Much wider interest in the British civil service has, in fact, been shown in the United States, whence the most illuminating writings on the subject have almost invariably emanated. For this reason, the present writer believes that there must be many members of the American Political Science Association who will be interested in a brief survey of civil service development, with particular reference to the changes at present in hand. It might be as well to point out that this essay is written with all the prejudices of a writer in Britain, e.g., with regard to the importance of open competitive recruitment and a quite different approach to veteran preference; but this in itself may add something to the article's interest.