Any economic system, whether systematic or not, involves a particular set of relationships between men and things and between men and men, and so needs the support of a corresponding legal and political system. One naturally expects political and legal change to follow social and economic revolutions. Perhaps that is the New Deal—a political and legal revolution to meet the demands of a new economic era. But whatever the situation may require to the mind of the Executive and Congress, there remains the question whether any particular legislative project is allowable under the Constitution. For our government, this matter of bringing law into conformity with economics meets with peculiar difficulties. It is not enough to secure rights by legislative enactment. Such guarantees must run the gauntlet first of administrative interpretation and ultimately of the courts. If one may judge from newspaper headlines, there is no surer way to bring our rights into controversy than to embody them in a statute.

International concerted action by states in economic affairs, save in the sphere of communications and transport, has a history of little more than one generation's span. Indeed, apart from the three disconnected conventions concluded before the Great War at Brussels concerning sugar subsidies, the publication of customs tariffs, and the exchange of comparable commercial statistics, respectively, efforts for international coöperation between governments date only from the Peace Settlement. Of the pre-war agreements, the first was denounced before the War; the second, which might still prove of considerable importance when national tariffs become fairly stable, has proved ineffective in a period of violent tariff changes; while the third came into operation only in 1922.

The movement, therefore, with the important exceptions in the sphere of communications and transport, owed its impetus to the work of the Peace Conferences; but save for Part XIII of the Versailles Treaty and the similar provisions of the other treaties—the labor clauses—no specific machinery was established by the treaties either within or without the framework of the Covenant for economic coöperation.

Forty years ago, an intelligent Englishman in a private letter described his impressions of the then state of American politics. “When educated men get to talking politics,” he wrote, “they have a sort of bitter despair in their minds which is not pleasant to listen to. I dare say the solution is one which was told me the other day. There is nothing in politics now.” “In a happy country like this, politics don't affect great questions or the happiness of the nation.” “Politics is all dullness relieved by rascality.”

For the greater part of the sixty years since the Civil War, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice's description of American politics has held substantially true, though of course more true at some times than others. The twelve-year period through which we have just passed was one of the intervals of which it was distinctly rather more than less true. Since then there has been a change. It is no longer true that politics do not affect great questions or the happiness of the nation.

The assumption by the government of the United States of diplomatic relations with the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on November 16, 1933, closed a long and unique chapter in the annals of American diplomacy. Now that this phase has become historic and a new era in Soviet-American relations has been officially inaugurated, it is possible to review and appraise the highly contentious and illucid interval between 1917 and 1933 with some degree of accuracy and finality. The purpose of this discussion is, therefore, to examine the whole period candidly, objectively, dispassionately, by means of an analysis of the attitude of the United States government, as officially expressed in diplomatic documents or the utterances of responsible statesmen in the period since tsardom fell in Russia. It is desirable, however, to relate those statements, and the positions taken, to the historic attitudes of both Russia and the United States in the course of the last one hundred years; for it is only as the policy of the United States is seen in its full historic setting, in relation to the principles of international law long espoused and followed in American diplomatic practice, that the more recent phases of that policy can adequately be judged.

Three decades have elapsed since the first president of the American Political Science Association at its inaugural meeting described the objects and purposes that it should pursue. Some of his successors have discussed various details of this program and others have reviewed the results achieved. Due recognition has been accorded to the significance of historical backgrounds, legal systems, and political theory. In addition, emphasis has been placed upon the importance of an understanding of the government as it actually functions. Hence, much of the work of this Association and its members has been devoted to the investigation and exposition of those customs, procedures, and institutions which, with or without any recognition by constitution or statute, exercise a profound influence over governmental organization and function.

It is natural that during this period significant changes should have appeared in the scope of Political Science and in the character of the techniques employed, with resulting differences in data and conclusions.

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.

In dealing with the evolution of political thought, most historians and social scientists, until recently at least, have tended to view political behavior and the changing patterns of power in society as rational implementations of dynamic ideas. They have accordingly concerned themselves more with the development of abstract philosophical systems than with the social-psychological contexts conditioning this development. To other observers, more Marxian than Hegelian in their outlook, all political ideas are but reflections of the economic interests and class ideologies of the various strata of society. This school therefore probes for the secrets of political and social change, not in the surface phenomena of ideas, but in the progress of technology and in the shifting economic relations of groups and classes within the social hierarchy. Still others, few in number as yet, have adopted Freud as their guide.

With astounding profusion, the presses are pouring out books, pamphlets, and articles on the New Deal. Economists, publicists, politicians, statesmen, editors, and prognosticators are “describing,” “interpreting,” and “forecasting” the outcome and results of the legislative and executive actions coming within the scope of the New Deal since March 4, 1933. This is proper and natural enough. It is inevitable.

But few of the writers guilty of publication have prefaced their reflections with due notice to the readers respecting the assumptions, methods of reasoning, hopes, fears, and desires actuating their thought at the beginning of their thinking about the description, interpretation, and forecasting operations. Most of them, probably, would say that it is academic to stop to think about what one is doing when one begins to think about social phenomena such as are embraced within the field of the New Deal; but the saying would be an escape, a dodge, or a trick. Why? Because nothing can be described in itself.

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.

The ceaseless struggle of opposing ideas is the historical continuum of political theory. However concrete the situation which launches a particular conflict, all too often the struggle of ideas continues long after the objective scene of the conflict has moved on to quite different fields, long after new problems have outmoded old solutions, and long after new ways of thinking should have revised or displaced old concepts. This intellectual problem of continuity of ideas and of modes of thought is, of course, no more than the reflection of the larger issue of the liberation of human society from the “dead hand of the past.” The solution of this problem is no easy one, entailing as it does careful discrimination and emphasis upon the quality of “deadness,” but many reasoned attempts are being made toward this end.

The forms which these attempts are taking in the field of political theory (including the concept of sovereignty, which is the subject of this paper) and of political science in general are several. We have had an increasing, and productive, “realistic presentation of the facts of the governmental process” which has served to deflate such overweening concepts as that of sovereignty.

The Federal Trade Commission has been the object of more scholarly examination and critical discussion than any other administrative commission in the federal government. The statutory authority, the internal organization, and the administrative procedure of the Commission have all been studied. More specialized researches have thrown light on its regulation of competitive practices and its relations with the courts. Our purpose here is to view the Commission in its relations with business and with Congress and the President, in order to achieve some understanding of the political and economic factors that have influenced its activities.

Underlying both sets of relationships are the conflicts of economic groups and special interests which attempt to convert their force into political power when they touch the legislator or the President. The attempt here will be to explore some of these rather intangible aspects of the Commission's administrative experience.

From Aristotle's day to this, the subject-matter of economics has been recognized by political scientists to affect very greatly the institutions with which the latter deal. In our own time, studies like those of Professors Charles A. Beard and Arthur N. Holcombe have carried the great bulk of American political scientists over to a primarily economic interpretation of political history. It is not too much to say that there has been some danger of political scientists conceding too much common ground to the economist's psychology and methods.

The economist, on the other hand, has for some decades at least, both in this country and abroad, had scant patience with political science. He has given even less recognition to the bearing of political factors upon the simple assumptions upon which his economic science too often rested. F. Delaisi characteristically wrote of Political Myths and Economic Realities, without much regard for a test of whether the myths might not be the more powerful realities in terms of survival value. “Politics” was something which, in an annoying and “unscientific” way, occasionally interfered with the operations of man as a profit-making animal. Politics was rarely thought of as a statement of those psychological motives and controlling social institutions which corrected or conditioned at every stage the jejune motivation and the mechanical equations upon which most economic generalizations rested.

The world as Aristotle and his contemporaries saw it was already a spent world. Its original creativeness had flowered during the sixth and fifth centuries in an outburst of discovery and invention in political and social as well as in literary fields. By the middle of the fourth century, it was the turn of the philosopher to take the results of the discoveries, and synthesize and publicize them in such a way that all the Greek communities should be enabled to work out the combination of forms of society and government best suited to their needs. The study made by Aristotle of the states of his own day maintained its authority across empire and into nationalism, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, up to the threshold of our own modern capitalistic civilization. From that time, however, a new era of inventions seems to have erected an insurmountable barrier between the old and the new, and the relevance of earlier thought for modern problems is called in question.

The Supreme Court of the United States has been as impartial an umpire in national-state disputes as one of the members of two contending teams could be expected to be. This is not to impugn the wisdom or the fairness of the Supreme Court, but it is to say that the Supreme Court has been partial to the national government during the past one hundred and forty-four years of our experience with a federal system in the United States. The states, as members of the federal system, have had to play against the umpire as well as against the national government itself. The combination has long been too much for them.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the decade following the Washington Conference constituted a distinct epoch in the Far East. The revolutionary surge of Nationalist China with its warcry, “abolish the unequal treaties,” threw the foreign Powers on the defensive for the first time in a century. Skillful Chinese diplomacy supported by physical, moral, and economic force swept away foreign rights and privileges of long standing. Expansive world prosperity bolstered up a sagging Japanese financial structure and encouraged all the Powers to respect the self-denying pledges of the Washington treaties and the demands of Chinese nationalism. This period terminated with the Japanese attack on Mukden in September, 1931. As hard times put increasing strain upon the economy of the Island Empire, the Japanese army, with continental ambitions rekindled, launched a bold campaign for hegemony north of the Great Wall—and possibly south.

During the nineteen-twenties, the center of gravity in China shifted to the Yangtse Valley. Shanghai, the foreign-controlled metropolis which stands at the cross-roads of Far Eastern commerce and dominates an immense hinterland, assumed a position of increasing importance in the domestic economy and international politics of China.

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.

We are witnessing today in both Europe and America the breakdown of what may be called the nineteenth-century equilibrium, and at the same time the effort to work out a new equilibrium as a basis of life for the twentieth century. The New Deal is the American phase of this movement. We can understand it better if we view it with the search-light of the movements in other countries, and if we make clear to ourselves what is driving them, how they are being driven, and what problems are in their path.

The key to recent social developments seems to me to lie in the resurgence of the middle classes. This is a development of the last decade or so, and is largely the result of the failure of the two other major social groups—the capitalists and the workers—to give Western society, especially Western European society, leadership and direction. On the one hand, the capitalistic groups, while concentrating industrial and financial resources, showed a sad incapacity to establish a leadership based on social needs and moral values.

From the great mass of Jefferson's writings, letters, and public utterances, it is possible to select isolated fragments in justification of almost any course one chooses to pursue; and the history of his forty years in the service of his country offers almost as various a pattern. Taking his career and his writings as a whole, however, and piecing together from both the broad outlines of a political philosophy, one is struck by what appears to be a dual emphasis: two diverging streams of thought, which seem at first glance to be incompatible, and which have rendered the great democrat vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency so often repeated in his own day as in ours. One of these emphases, and that most apt to be quoted by campaign orators, is on individualism; but the direction and purpose of the other is socialistic.

Both in the abstract system of the philosopher and in the concrete events of the world of action, time has a way of reconciling apparent contradictions. Historical perspective will do much to reveal unsuspected unities, and the point of view from which the inquiry is approached will do the rest.