The action of the United States Senate upon the large majority of treaties laid before it has been comparatively perfunctory and without important result. Four-fifths of all the treaties submitted to the Senate have been approved by it without any change whatever. Twenty-one per cent have been altered in the Senate, for the most part by changes of words or clauses that later passed the scrutiny of both the President and the foreign powers concerned. Of the 152 treaties amended by the Senate, only one-fifth have been changed so seriously as to compromise or destroy the international agreement proposed. Likewise, the failure of 62 treaties to be approved by the Senate in any form has had serious consequences in not more than a fifth of the situations resulting.

Moreover, while all kinds of treaties have incurred the Senate's displeasure, it has consistently emasculated only one type, i.e., those for the pacific settlement of disputes. It is upon the Senate's action on this class of treaties that opinion as to the usefulness of its rôle in treaty-making must divide. To those who believe that a policy of national isolation can and should be maintained, the record of the Senate is not disturbing; it is highly praiseworthy.

The use of superlatives is always dangerous, but it may be said, with little exaggeration, that Henry Adams was the Aristotle of America. His similarity to the great pupil of Plato, however, lies not so much in his influence upon subsequent thinkers as in the astonishing range of his interests and studies. Probably no other man of recent times has made such an ambitious effort as he to explore the entire realm of human knowledge and to deduce from it some logical answer to the riddle of the universe, with particular reference to the destiny of society. At a time when specialization had become the order of the day, and when it was considered presumptuous for a man to attempt to master more than one tiny segment of knowledge, he ranged the whole field like a titan, concerning himself with history, politics, economics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology, anthropology, and psychology.

More than ten years ago, the Earl of Birkenhead, former Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, speaking before the American Bar Association, expressed the belief that it was a question for the future to determine whether the barriers which the framers of the constitutions placed upon the complete freedom of legislative assemblies in the United States will prove equal to the emergencies as they arise and will be as adaptable to the stress and strain of political exigencies as the more flexible and more democratic arrangements of the British constitution. “Your constitution,” he remarked, “is expressed and defined in documents which can be pronounced upon by the Supreme Court. In this sense, your judges are the masters of your executive. Your constitution is a cast-iron document. It falls to be construed by the Supreme Court with the same sense of easy and admitted mastery as any ordinary contract. This circumstance provides a breakwater of enormous value against ill-considered and revolutionary changes.” On the other hand, so far as England is concerned, the genius of the Anglo-Saxon people has, rightly or wrongly, refused to shackle in the slightest degree the constitutional competence of later generations. Any law of Great Britain can be altered by Parliament and no court may challenge the constitutional force of an act of Parliament. It is on the whole premature, thought Lord Birkenhead, to decide whether you or we have been right.

This study of aggressive behavior by clients on public relief in Chicago in 1932–33 is intended to be relevant to two supplementary kinds of political theory. In so far as relations are found between economic changes and political activity, the findings bear upon the theory of political equilibrium, which seeks to state the general conditions under which political changes occur. In so far as relations are found which bear upon the diffusion of specific political symbols and practices, the results are pertinent to theories of political development, which emphasize the time-bound aspects of political change.

Spanish and Cuban events during the past three years, and the recent labor disputes on the Pacific coast, have once again brought the general strike into the limelight. The abdication of King Alphonso and the flight of President Machado showed the potentialities of a successful general strike when labor faces the revolutionary logic of that weapon. The San Francisco débacle proved the futility of that method when labor refuses to admit its revolutionary implications.

As a feature of a reformed May Day celebration, the cabinet of Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss, on May 1 last, decreed a new constitution for Austria. The rather lengthy document, consisting of 182 articles and covering some 32 pages in the official Bundesgesetzblatt, is mainly the work of Dr. Otto Ender, former chancellor, who, on July 18, 1933, joined the Dollfuss cabinet as minister for constitutional and administrative reform. It had been approved on April 30 at the final session of the lower house of the republican parliament, the Nationalrat. Owing to the cabinet's cancellation of the mandates of 72 Social Democratic deputies and of two other deputies who had manifested National Socialist sympathies, only 91 of those who had been elected to the Nationalrat in 1930 were eligible to attend the session.

When Canada set up a federal system of government in 1867, she had nearly eighty years of American experience to build upon. Consequently, she was able to evade many of the problems in which we find ourselves entangled today. When Austria provided for judicial review in her constitution of 1920, she could profit from more than a century and a quarter of American experience, as well as from the various modifications of the American plan to be found in the British Dominions and elsewhere. Hence, we should not be surprised to learn that in the opinion of Dr. Hans Kelsen the theory and practice of judicial control of legislation reached a more complete development in Austria than in any other nation.

When the United States government, on January 7, 1932, and the Extraordinary Assembly of the League of Nations, on March 11, 1932, and again on February 24, 1933, invoked non-recognition as a sanction,1 the necessity at once arose of determining what would be the precise effects, as far as international relations are concerned, of withholding recognition of Manchukuo. It may seem strange that the decision to resort to non-recognition as a sanction was taken before an attempt was made to determine the practical effects of such action on the Far Eastern situation. Presumably, however, this must be the procedure in the application of international sanctions.