On September 23,19…, in Roscommon county in the Southern Peninsula of Michigan, the county clerk called the local officials together at the court house. Of the county administrators, the sheriff, treasurer, prosecuting attorney, circuit court judge, register of deeds, health and welfare administrators, and highway engineer were present. Many of the township supervisors had managed somehow to reach the court house in spite of the streams of refugees pouring northward from the destroyed industrial cities of southern Michigan. Already the county was bursting with new and unforeseen problems of public administration. The traffic jam on U. S. highway 27 from Lansing northward was something beyond the memory of the oldest living inhabitant. Near Houghton Lake, this traffic was jammed by another stream which had followed U. S. 23 northward from Saginaw and Bay City, turning inland at Standish by way of state highways 76 and 55 to connect with U.S. 27. The flight of stampeding and determined refugees was flowing like a river through the county seat of Roscommon and ever northward toward Cheboygan and Mackinaw City at the tip of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

“This meeting was called,” said the clerk, “to discuss how we can handle this emergency. One of the state police officers who has been on reconnaissance with a deputy sheriff will tell us what we are up against in this area. For 36 hours our telephone and telegraphic communications with Washington and Lansing have been out. We are on our own and must make the best of a terrible emergency.”

The political groups in the Kizoku-in, or House of Peers, are of more importance than the scant attention paid them by both native and foreign students of Japanese government implies. In fact, one of the six groups habitually controls the House, which, in turn, is one of the strongest national second chambers existing today. As a result, the Kenkyū-kai, or Study Association, commands steady, the other groups intermittent, patronage in the form of appointments to cabinet or sub-cabinet positions and concessions to their legislative wishes. The political groups in the House of Peers became a concern of Japanese statesmen shortly after the organization of the Diet in 1890; they are today debated in relation to the proposals for legislative reform which have been repeatedly urged since 1932. Although but minor wheels in the mechanism, some knowledge of their place and function is essential to an adequate understanding of the operation of the complicated Japanese political machine.

The history, organization, and influence of these groups is not easy to determine; the scarcity of reliable sources, even in Japanese, makes doubly confusing the large number of diverse yet meaningless group titles which have been employed since 1890.

Prior to the National Revolution of 1933, one of the foremost postulates guiding the conduct of German civil servants was that of political neutrality. The permanent public personnel—national, state, and local—was to consider itself, in the apt formulation of the Weimar constitution, “servants of the whole people, not of a party.” Although imprudent legislative and executive measures taken during the republican era weakened rather than strengthened the principle of neutrality, it was effectively upheld by the disciplinary courts. Indirectly, the professional tenet of non-partisanship facilitated German bureaucracy's identification with a broadly conceived constitutionalism. At a time when the National Socialist vote had become the largest in national elections, organizers for the new creed still made least headway among the government personnel. Statistics published in 1936 disclose the fact that less than four per cent of all civil servants joined the national Socialist party before Hitler's rise to the chancellorship. As the incoming Reich cabinet was not slow to recognize the “impossibility” of large-scale displacements, it resorted to transitional regulations in order to weed out overtly heterogeneous elements.

The various suggestions for reorganization of the War Agencies now pending in the Congress pose two other questions, perhaps as fundamental to the successful prosecution of the war as the question whether the nation's war effort is itself best centralized and organized. The first is: Are the War Agencies, and is the war effort, correctly related to the various other portions of the government, that is, those portions of the executive branch of the government which were in existence prior to 1940? The second question is: Is the entire federal government, in all of its military, quasi-military, and civilian aspects, in need of far-reaching reorganization in order that the war effort may effectively be administered, and that the peace which is to follow may be well administered also?