The ideas of the bloodless and “glorious Revolution” of 1688, and especially those of John Locke, inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States and, both directly and indirectly, influenced the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century a successful Britain also made her great contribution to European civilization, and this not least in terms of her political ideas and of her parliamentary institutions. Politically it would be quite accurate to say that she led the world.

In this present generation, however, England is in a poorer way as a fount of political ideas than she has been for centuries. The great succession of Occam and Fortescue, More and Hooker, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, the Mills, Green, even Spencer, perhaps Bradley, seems to be broken. Many British writers are too content to subedit Hegel or Marx and to explain what they really meant. The most eminent now living, Lord Russell, is primarily a mathematical philosopher.

American democracy is not combating crime successfully. We are given the unenviable distinction of leading the civilized world in murder, robbery, burglary and other of the graver crimes against person and property. As a nation we have a disconcertingly high criminal ratio and in our large cities, where the opportunities and temptations for crime are greater, constantly recurring crime waves threaten our social organization.

The administration of justice is a state function. Police officers are technically state officials and justices of the peace, police and municipal courts are performing state functions, yet it nevertheless is true that the prevention, detection and treatment of crime and criminals are of special importance to city dwellers and under our decentralized administration of justice the city ought to feel its responsibility and be given the opportunity to deal with the problem in an intelligent manner.

It has been estimated that in Cleveland, Ohio, two-thirds of those who commit serious crimes are never arrested, and of the one-third arrested two-thirds are never convicted. The administration of criminal law has been declared a failure in Cleveland but few of our other large cities have any special reason for self-congratulation. Our criminal statistics in general are very unreliable and inadequate. The census bureau has been making an ambitious attempt at securing criminal statistics but has found it difficult and at times impossible to secure even the simplest data.

Among the experiments in government which have taken place in post-war Germany, one of the most varied in form is to be found in the theory and practice of direct legislation. The referendum, initiative, and a type of recall exist in national, state, and local governments. The experience of the German people with these constitutional practices has been treated occasionally in studies of the national and municipal governments, and this note is designed to perform a similar service with regard to the German states.

Studies of the constitutional convention at Weimar seem to indicate that direct legislation was adopted for the national constitution without a great deal of study. The Germans had, however, been acquainted with the idea of direct legislation for some time, and a proposal for its use had found expression in the Erfurter Program of the Social Democratic party. The provisional arrangements for the national government during the revolutionary period included machinery for an appeal to the electorate in cases of disagreement between the ordinary organs of government. But the widest use of the various forms of direct legislation is first to be found in the provisional constitutions of the states.

Of all the changes that have occurred in Yugoslavia since 1948, one of the most interesting is the development of a new theory and role for the Communist Party. Now officially called the League of Communists, the Yugoslav Party illustrates both the well-known dominant role of Communist parties in states where they have come to power and at the same time the peculiar nature of Yugoslav Communism that has set it apart from the Soviet variety.

Organized on the Soviet pattern and headed by men steeped in the Soviet tradition, the Yugoslav Communists even in 1945 occupied a position like that of their comrades in the USSR, where, as Stalin said, “not a single important political or organizational question is decided without directions from the Party ….” Even after the Cominform dispute had produced a new ideological pattern, a more liberal approach to Communism, political and economic decentralization and profuse professions of democracy, few could doubt that, as Stalin said about the situation in the Soviet Union, “the Party governs the country.”