Recent years have seen increasing experimentation with and reliance upon interlevel administrative collaboration for adapting our traditional practices of government to the rapid extension and elaboration of national policies. In many instances, collaboration across the levels has been based upon the well-tried device of the grant-in-aid. In others, the practices of conferring, advising, transmitting official information, and acting jointly or interdependently for the performance of governmental services have been quickened. In yet other instances where federal as well as state agencies now regulate the same areas of business enterprise, a considerable body of collaborative interlevel practice has been developed. It is with this last field, especially as the collaborative action is directed toward the regulation of public service enterprises, that we are here concerned.

Prior to 1933, federal regulation of public service enterprises had a long experience with railroads (1887), a longer experience with banks coming under the national system (1863), and a shorter experience under the Federal Reserve System (1913), and a yet shorter experience with water-power enterprises (1920). States and localities developed agencies and practices for the regulation of railroads and local transportation systems, banks, water, gas, telephone, and electric utilities, and, in the twenties, highway bus and trucking operations.

In spite of the recent loosening of the membership or affiliation requirements in Illinois and a few other states, the general tendency throughout the development of party regulation has been toward greater strictness in this respect, toward more effective protection of the party organization against the independent voter with a careless party conscience. This is indicated, in the first place, by the turn toward an official definition and administration of these membership tests. That is, the parties are no longer left free to determine their own membership rules as they please, but these rules are to an increasing extent prescribed by state law and administered by state officials. Secondly, the tests of party membership have become, on the whole, more complex and more comprehensive, and therefore more difficult to evade—the closed primary has become more and more tightly closed. Thirdly, there has been a drift from the challenge to the enrollment or registration system, and, in general, legislation or other official action which requires greater care by the voter and the candidate in the selection of his party, and which imposes greater difficulty in changing his party affiliation.

The membership of the Supreme Court underwent but one change during the 1940 term. Mr. Justice McReynolds retired on February 1, 1941. Chief Justice Hughes retired on June 2, 1941, after the term had closed. The vacancies thus created were both filled during the summer recess. Mr. Justice McReynolds, a Tennessee Democrat, was Attorney-General in President Wilson's first cabinet, and was appointed to the Court in 1914. He has long been rated one of the most conservative of the justices and was a consistent and bitter opponent of the New Deal and all its works. Mr. Justice Van Devanter, who had retired in 1937, died on February 8, 1941.

The first session of the Seventy-seventh Congress witnessed much activity in both houses, resulting, however, mainly in appropriation measures and defense legislation. Most of the bills carried through to enactment were calculated to meet the expectations of the President as set forth in his annual message of January 6, 1941. In that message, the President assured Congress that the “future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders…. The immediate need,” he said, “is a swift and driving increase in our armament production.” Before the session came to a close, joint resolutions declaring war on Japan, Germany, and Italy were passed. Thus it was perhaps the most epoch-making and influential legislative year, for the future affairs of our people, of any since the “founding fathers” assembled in New York City on March 4, 1789, to start legislating under the new national constitution.

The battle over the tax-exempt security between the federal and the state and local governments has entered a new phase. Not content with merely taxing the income of new federal securities issued after March 1, 1941, the President, in his budget message to Congress of January 6, 1942, recommended legislation which would tax future state and local government securities, and the Secretary of the Treasury, in a speech in Cleveland on January 24, 1942, declared that it was high time to tax the income of outstanding issues as well. Up to this point, it had been the policy of the Administration to request only that the income tax be applied to future state and local government obligations.

Emphasis on the study of public administration has in recent years become so marked that of all the fields in the study of government it stands out as the most rapidly growing. What Woodrow Wilson called attention to some fifty years ago has in fact become the center of interest in political science. No longer is hard study confined to the problem of making constitutions. The study of administration has concerned itself extensively with the processes and procedures, with the ways of carrying out public policy. However, Woodrow Wilson's advice, recommending the careful determination of the basic political conceptions necessary for the student of public administration, has not always been followed; and the present note is designed to suggest some factors bearing on these basic political conceptions. Specifically, it is to be emphasized that the means through which the state carries on its functions cannot be adequately analyzed except in relation to its ends.

The war in the Pacific has focused attention on rubber as one of the key materials of peace and war economy. It has not only caused domestic adjustments in the United States as previously in other consuming countries, both allied and enemy, but has terminated an epoch in international rubber control. At the same time, it has accentuated the permanent international concern about basic materials—their location, accessibility, production, distribution, and utilization. Thus the international rubber régime, as it operated up to the disruption of trade-lanes and the invasion and devastation of producing areas, is of interest not only because of its effects in the period just ended but also as an approach to problems of international economic policy and administrative technique which are likely to continue into post-war world organization, no matter how different its political and strategical foundations may be.