It has seemed fitting, at this second meeting of the Association in New Orleans, where it was organized a quarter of a century ago, to give some attention to significant happenings during this period, in the affairs of the Association, in the field of political action, and in the analysis and interpretation of political phenomena. At least two former presidents have discussed some phases of these topics; but there is perhaps room for a difference of approach and emphasis.

When this Association was organized, the systematic study and teaching of political problems was but slightly developed. Only a few courses in public law and government were given in some of the larger universities. Of the twenty-five persons who were present at the organization of the Association, and the 214 who became members during the first year, a large proportion were primarily interested in history, economics, and other social studies with political bearings, rather than in political problems themselves.

In the constitution of the Association, its object was stated to be: “The encouragement of the scientific study of politics, public law, administration, and diplomacy.” In the first presidential address, President Goodnow outlined the field of work of the Association as including political theory, constitutional and administrative law, comparative legislation, historical and comparative jurisprudence, and political parties. He also noted the opportunity of the Association to secure the active coöperation of teachers of these subjects, and to bring together the student and those actively engaged in political life. A further indication of the plans of those who established the Association may be seen in the appointment of a series of standing committees on different branches of the field outlined, and the reorganization of these a year later into sections.

I have been asked to present for your discussion the pragmatic approach to political science, the reason being, as I suppose, that my business is the study of philosophy and pragmatism is a kind of philosophy. Now philosophy has special interests of its own and hardly ever offers anything that can be taken over ready-made into scientific work with any useful results; moreover, the discussion of methods at large hardly ever leads to much. A method is good for just what it does, and its uses must be apparent just in the science where it is used. I greatly doubt, therefore, whether any good would come of my talking to you about philosophic pragmatism, which is a name of rather indefinite meaning, signifying a group of scientific and philosophic tendencies rather than a systematic doctrine. It does stand roughly for a point of view, which has perhaps been stated most clearly by Professor John Dewey, and it is a fact that this point of view has acted as a sort of ferment outside philosophy, especially in economics and law, and seems likely to have a significant influence on these subjects, at least in America and during the next few years. What I mean to do, therefore, is to try to picture pragmatism in action, compressing into a single paragraph the description of pragmatism as a point of view. To illustrate pragmatism in action, I have chosen some attempts to adopt this point of view in economics, particularly the work of Thorstein Veblen and Professor Wesley C. Mitchell, and also in the study of law, particularly the program put forward by Professors Walter Wheeler Cook and Herman Oliphant.

It is no longer customary to the extent that it formerly was to maintain that judicial review of legislation and the consequent annulment of laws is an exclusively American political practice. With the courts of at least a score of countries passing on the validity of legislative acts, and occasionally refusing to apply them in concrete cases, the American method of guarding constitutions, characterized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a new political phenomenon, has now an extensive application among the countries operating under written fundamental laws.

Interesting developments are taking place with respect to judicial review of legislation in foreign countries. Austria and Czechoslovakia have established special constitutional courts with authority to determine whether acts are in accord with their constitutions. Germany is in the process of adopting judicial review of acts of the national government as implied in the provisions of the new constitution. According to certain jurists, French courts have taken the first steps to establish themselves as the special interpreters and guardians of the French constitution. Though the dominant opinion of French lawyers and statesmen is opposed to judicial review as a feature of the French system of government, there is a growing sentiment in favor of the acceptance of the principle, as a necessary means of rendering more effective the provisions of the constitution and of protecting individual rights as guaranteed in the Declaration of Rights. The Irish Free State has followed the lead of Canada and Australia in placing the guardianship of its new constitution in the courts. In adopting a new constitution, Chile appears to have taken preliminary steps to change a system of parliamentary supremacy to a modified régime of judicial supremacy. There is considerable public discussion in Switzerland of the possibility of accepting the principle of review of the acts of the Federal Assembly.

Not long ago, a distinguished political scientist called attention to “the law of the pendulum” in politics. No sooner, he argued, does a broad political tendency establish itself than tendencies of opposite direction set in and gather force until the original tendency is reversed. As applied to relatively short periods of time and to movements which reflect temporary trends, a plausible case can be made out for the law of the pendulum. It seems doubtful, however, whether it can be proved with like plausibility for tendencies which are truly secular. Take as an example the steady trend toward enlarging the size of the independent political unit, or state. Since the feudal age, the tendency has run in the same direction, sometimes more slowly and sometimes more rapidly, but with seldom a check, and never a retreat, from the feudal state to the national state, from the national state to the colonial empire, and in recent years from the colonial empire toward some larger goal of world organization. Barring accidental destruction of modern machine civilization, a recurrence to a world of petty states seems unthinkable.

Whether or not the law of the pendulum applies in the world of political events, there can be no doubt of its sway over political thought. No sooner does a doctrine embody itself in an institution than it exposes its nakedness in a pillory and challenges competing dogmas to do their worst. In consequence, the history of political ideas has been a story of oscillations, of attack and repulse and counter-attack.

A study of the beginnings of national representation inevitably brings to the surface details which in their time were part or parcel of mediæval practices. One cannot expect that these usages, even as connected with representative institutions, can be of concern in our more complex modern circumstances, since the Middle Ages had comparatively few and simple problems for legislative solution. In those days the questions of relationship between the administrative and the legislative, and between the local and the central or national, had not emerged clearly. Nevertheless, such details and questions are interesting as examples of mediæval theory and efficiency, and, moreover, some of them are not entirely devoid of connection with present-day difficulties.

The custom of making in advance a decision which was imposed by the electors upon their chosen representative, a custom known as the imperative mandate, was an important factor in early representative government. It was sound in legal theory, and some of its practice will be seen in the pages which follow. Also, its connection is with that early stage in popular government in which the development of representative institutions corresponded somewhat to one phase of the present. I refer to what is apparently a need to ask from the electors themselves their opinion on large, general questions of principle—for example, in our time, the referendum in Germany on the adoption of the Young Plan.

The connection between public opinion and public policy is slighter in foreign affairs than in any other sphere of politics. In normal times, international relations have little palpable impact upon the life of the people, and are obscured by more vivid domestic issues until war or some sudden crisis throws a high light on their significance. Even since the Great War, although public realization of the importance of foreign affairs has begun to be aroused in the late belligerent countries—in England at any rate—direct contact between popular opinion and government action is still both sporadic and uncertain.

What is true of the British nation is almost equally true of its representative assembly. Parliament has but little power over foreign affairs. Some of the most momentous changes in the country's relations with other Powers have, in the present century, been accomplished without reference to the House of Commons, and often without even its knowledge. Like the people themselves, the people's representatives exercise only an inconsiderable control over that branch of public affairs which is at present of more vital concern than any other.

Most British foreign secretaries, indeed, regard their actions as matters of exclusively executive concern. A cabinet of twenty ministers, already overworked in their own departments, is not, however, a body which can conduct the country's foreign relations. On his own subject, the Foreign Secretary dominates his ministerial colleagues. Experience shows that he can avoid consultation with all the cabinet save two or three of the principal ministers.

Political science has dealt too long, on the one hand, with the ideal, and, on the other hand, with the abnormal and perverted features of political society, rather than with the normal and the eventual. Our theory of ideal democracy is perhaps more suited to the Greek and Roman city-state, with participation as the test of the good citizen. Representation has been heralded as the device which makes the ancient ideal possible on a large scale. But in practice it has been found that the enormous expansion of the public, i.e., the body of persons who have the right of participation, has made the problem far more complex than was at first thought possible. Greek ideals of education and coercion of the citizen body toward general improvement have been carried out with greater success, and our statute books reflect a Hobbesian attitude toward human nature which is true only in part. The political philosophy of democracy must be built on the facts of political life.

Shall we break with the Greek and Roman ideal of the participation of the citizen group in the affairs of the state? It is true that the present attitude is a revised form of the democratic ideal of antiquity, but with a different interpretation of the meaning of citizenship. All democratic governments must finally rest on some theory of the suffrage; any study of the fact of non-voting must be based on a theory of the suffrage likewise. With the expansion of the theory of citizenship to include all subjects, a corresponding theory of limited participation was developed—no doubt a product of the Middle Ages. The totality of citizens was distrusted, and some test of participation had to be devised. Such was the origin of religious tests for political participation; such was the origin of the distinction between the right to vote and the fact of citizenship.

Politics has been referred to by a recent writer as a “great game,” which, it may be added, is played ordinarily, not in a political vacuum between a majority and an opposing minority, but rather by groups organized on an economic, social, religious, or racial basis, which coalesce with each other and fall apart only to make new combinations. This process may readily be seen if one turns the telescope on the national political firmament, but it cannot be understood in the minutias of its ceaseless activity unless the microscope be applied to relatively small localities. The state of Texas, because of its wide extent and consequent variations of social and political phenomena, presents an admirable laboratory for this microscopic method of attack. It is proposed here to apply this method to a particular political section of Texas which has recently attracted some attention.

The section referred to is that extreme southern portion of the state lying, in general, south of the Nueces River and east of Laredo, embracing thirteen counties and aggregating in area some 18,000 square miles. There are a number of reasons why it merits attention. The first and foremost is that the major element of its population is Mexican in race, but to a large extent American born. Many of these Mexican-Americans are descendants of the first settlers. It was rather the Anglo-American who was the newcomer. Obviously, therefore, the usual process of racial adjustment has been somewhat reversed. The American found the Mexican, and it was the Mexican to whom he to some extent adjusted himself.

“Liberty of contract” is an honorable phrase. It is not too much to say that contractual freedom is generally regarded as the crowning glory of Anglo-American law in general and of the American constitutional system in particular. Belief in a pre-civil state of nature may have been cast into the discard, but not so the belief in natural law in the sense of ideal law, in natural rights as rights superior—if not anterior—to civil rights, and in freedom of contract as one of the greatest of the natural rights secured by natural law. There is well-nigh universal approbation of the philosophy implicit in Sir Henry Maine's famous conclusion that “the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract,” and there is general satisfaction that certain American constitutional provisions preclude any retrograde movement in the future. In particular, there is rejoicing that the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments insure to the American workman his natural freedom of contract against any insidious attempt to relegate him to a servile status. In spite of an occasional voice crying in the wilderness, it is still heretical to suggest that constitutional contractual liberty amounts to a guarantee that economic pressure may be exerted by the rich upon the poor, by the employer upon the employee. The hypothesis deserves further examination. It will be profitable to ascertain how far the use of economic pressure has been deemed natural in English law and philosophy, and then to observe the extent to which it is recognized in American constitutional law as a natural right superior to any legislative enactment.

(April 15,1929, to November 22, 1929). Almost the last word said in the Senate before the adjournment of the special session was a remonstrance from the chair. “No one in the gallery has a right to laugh,” said the Vice-President, “and the occupants of the galleries will be in order. That includes the press gallery.” It has been easy to laugh. Seldom, however, has a single session of Congress held greater interest for the observer of social forces. Seldom has the salutary rôle of the Senate in our present political complex been more convincingly demonstrated.

Membership. The general election of 1928 seated 268 Republicans, 166 Democrats, and one Farmer Labor member. Three of the four vacancies that developed before the new Congress convened were on the Democratic side. At the opening of the special session, the Republican majority was 103, compared with majorities of 39, 60, 15, 167, and 39 in the Congresses elected in 1926, 1924, 1922, 1920, and 1918, respectively. Even in the more nearly poised, less regimented Senate, the weight of the majority seemed to afford a considerable margin of safety, with 55 Republicans (not including a junior senator from Pennsylvania) listed in opposition to 39 Democrats and one Farmer Labor member.

Organization. No innovations in procedure or outcome marked the institution of the party instrumentalities summarized in an attached table. The four preparatory caucuses were held between the first and the fifth of March. The House Republicans continued their organization without material change.

Membership. Even in seasons when politics are pointing toward congressional elections of unusual interest, the filling of vacancies in the House attracts little attention. Political perspectives are almost unavoidably narrowed by the reaction of presidential government; localism confuses general tendencies; and the prevalence of one-party areas further conceals trends which can be read only by a close scrutiny of relative returns. It is not that the opportunity for by-elections is lacking. In the course of the session under consideration, twenty-three seats in the House were vacated, five by resignation and eighteen by death. The resulting replacements brought the Democrats a net gain of one; for, though losing their sole foothold in Pennsylvania, they won in the third district in Kentucky and the second district in Massachusetts. In the latter, never previously represented by a Democrat, the victory of W. J. Granfield in the special election on February 11,1930, was widely noted and deemed significant by many, although it was not clear whether it indicated a desire for drink or a dread of depression.

The Senate came to grips at last with the long-delayed problem of the Pennsylvania senatorship. In accordance with an understanding reached in the special session, Senator Norris's resolution (S. Res. 111) to deny William S. Vare a seat in the Senate came up on December 3. Debate closed on December 6, when the resolution was adopted by a vote of 58 (25 Republicans, 32 Democrats, 1 Farmer Labor) to 22 (all Republicans).

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.

To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. “There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment.”

In a recent issue of the Review, Professor James Hart, of Johns Hopkins University, has advocated a limitation upon the doctrine announced in the Myers case so that Congress may prescribe the terms of office of the members of the various quasi-judicial administrative tribunals, and incidentally that of the Comptroller-General.

The present writer's views on the status of the Comptroller-General are expressed elsewhere. He also dissents from Professor Hart's views on the expediency of granting to the various administrative tribunals any different terms of office from those which the Chief Justice indicated in the Myers case that they already have. This dissent is not a little supported by the practical suggestion of Dr. Hart. He indicates that “constitutional mores” are alone not enough to regulate the President's actions in exercising his power to remove, but that a definite term and formula should be prescribed and “constitutional mores” then depended upon to keep the President within the bounds of the formula. The limited experience of the present writer indicates that it is easier to satisfy a formula which is presumed to prescribe justice than to satisfy the dictates of justice on the facts of each case.

Expediency, however, is a matter of opinion. One who attempts to criticize the logic and technique of another must accept the other's views of expediency.

The experience of Ohio with the requirement of concurrence of an extraordinary majority of the Supreme Court to declare a statute invalid is an illuminating commentary on the desirability of such a restriction. Much has been spoken and written on both sides of the question. Those who have seen laws embodying worth-while reforms invalidated by the courts, many times by bare majority decisions, have campaigned for a curtailment of the judicial prerogative. Publicists have expatiated on the evils of the situation. Textbook writers have embodied the arguments in their discussions. Teachers, it is to be feared, have quite glibly enlarged upon the necessity of unseating our “judicial obligarchy.”

The late President Theodore Roosevelt, addressing the Ohio constitutional convention in 1912, urged that body to propose an amendment providing for the recall of judicial decisions. He failed to convince the convention of the desirability of his remedy, but he succeeded in creating a feeling that something must be done; and an amendment to the judiciary article was adopted, reading as follows: “No law shall be held unconstitutional and void by the Supreme Court without the concurrence of at least all but one of the judges, except in the affirmance of a judgment of the court of appeals declaring the law unconstitutional and void.” Since the Supreme Court is composed of a chief justice and six associate justices, the restriction amounts to a requirement of the concurrence of six justices in decisions of this kind.

On July 1, 1924, there became effective an act for the reorganization and improvement of the Foreign Service of the United States, popularly known as the Rogers Act, which had been approved on May 24. That act combined the hitherto separate diplomatic and consular services into a single Foreign Service. Admission to the Foreign Service was for the most part to be upon competitive examination, and promotion was to be based upon merit. The act left to the executive the establishment of the system for ascertaining merit.

Pursuant to the Rogers Act, an executive order of June 7, 1924, created a Foreign Service Personnel Board. The composition of the board was slightly changed by an executive order of February 25, 1928, under the terms of which the board was to be composed of three assistant secretaries of state to be designated by the Secretary of State, and three Foreign Service officers. The three Foreign Service officers, representing both the diplomatic and consular branches, were to constitute the executive committee of the board.

Among other things, the Foreign Service Personnel Board was charged with the duty of submitting to the Secretary, when vacancies should arise in the Foreign Service, lists of officers whose records of efficiency entitled them to advancement in the service and who were therefore recommended for promotion. A departmental order directed the executive committee to take possession of all records relating to the personnel of the diplomatic and consular services and to keep the efficiency records of all Foreign Service officers.

Expansion and Contraction of the Franchise. Between the theory and practice of the American Revolution there was a wide breach. The ruling caste of property owners retained control in spite of the legendary democratization of that era. Jefferson's declaration of the equality of man was not fully applied to suffrage requirements until the time of Andrew Jackson. Since then, suffrage restrictions of property, color, and sex have suffered the fate of houses built upon sand. The floods of democracy have now smitten upon these limitations for more than a century. In the rise of the common man, both the property-owning and taxpaying qualifications for voters disappeared even in the original commonwealths. Once these restrictions which separated the old aristocracy from the new proletariat had been vanquished, the requisites of color and sex were likewise abandoned.

With few exceptions, suffrage had been granted to practically all adult male white citizens before the Civil War. Yet counter-attacks were waged by the advocates of a limited electorate. The theory prevails that a steady swing toward universal suffrage characterizes the American franchise. The pendulum has also swung in the opposite direction. Connecticut and Massachusetts, where the reaction against suffrage extension was rapid, were the first states to retrench on the policy of adult male white suffrage. In place of property qualifications, literacy restrictions appeared. The purpose of these restrictions set up by Connecticut in 1855 and Massachusetts in 1857 was to bar the ignorant immigrants from the voting class.

In Oklahoma, impeachment is of the soil racy. In the twenty-three years of statehood, thirteen impeachment messages have been received in the Senate from the House. Governor Williams (1914-18) has been the only one of six elected governors against whom House investigations were not ordered, and he may have been spared by the unusual House rule which declared any members guilty of perjury who swore to charges that were not substantiated in an investigation.

Backed by the farmer-labor group, John C. Walton was elected governor in 1922 in a campaign marked by bitterness and party bolting. Before he was inaugurated, rumor had it that he would be impeached. Opposition to him sprang from three main sources—disappointed office-seekers, the klan, and the school bloc. However, it was the klan that finally dragged him down. To prevent klan outrages and to punish their perpetrators, Walton attempted to employ the military forces of the state. Martial law was declared in the city of Tulsa on August 13, 1923. It was soon extended to the whole of Tulsa county, to Okmulgee county, and finally on September 1 to the whole state. Adding to the confusion, the legislature tried to convene itself in extraordinary session, under the excuse that the governor's action had made such a step necessary and essential to the welfare of the state. Walton countered by branding the legislators as klansmen and a meeting of the legislature as an unlawful klan assembly. An attempted convening was frustrated by armed force on September 16.

“Pocket veto” is the term applied to the killing of a bill by the President by the process of retaining it without signing it when Congress adjourns before the bill has been in his hands ten days. The Constitution provides for the pocket veto by stating: “If any bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law.” In the “Pocket Veto” case the Court decided that the word “adjournment” in this clause refers not merely to the final adjournment at the expiration of a Congress, but to any temporary or ad interim adjournment. In short, the President may effectively pocket veto a bill whenever Congress, by going home, prevents him from returning it within ten days. The Court thus gave judicial sanction to a practice which has been followed sporadically ever since the days of Madison.

On June 24, 1926, a bill was presented to President Coolidge authorizing certain Indian tribes to sue in the Court of Claims. On July 3 the first session of the 69th Congress adjourned, and it did not meet again until December. It was not in session on July 6—the tenth day after the bill was presented to the President (Sundays excepted).