clusion," in which the author views with disfavor and even with alarm the collectivistic legislation of England during recent years, is brought into relation with the rest of the book only by the observation that, ultimately, these new conditions, which he describes as creating "an atmosphere of confusion and of constant annihilation of rights," will react upon the courts.

The Business of Congress. By SAMUEL W. McCALL. (New York: The Columbia University Press, 1911. Pp. 215.)

The problem of efficient administrative organization and operation is one which all governments have to meet. The successful conduct of a legislative body with comprehensive and independent powers is, however, a peculiarly important and difficult task which republics have to perform. This task, a serious one under the best circumstances, becomes still more difficult when, as is the case of Congress, the extent of our territory and the size of our population make necessary a numerous lawmaking body, and the diversity of interests to be recognized and regulated provides an almost overwhelming amount of work to be done. Considering, then, the importance of the problem, there has been surprisingly little scientific discussion of it, and no comprehensive treatise dealing with it. Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government is more than twenty years old, and deals in very considerable measure with the relations of Congress to the executive rather than with the details of legislative procedure. Professor Reinsch's more recent treatise, American Legislatures and Legislative Methods, deals generally with legislative organization and methods of lawmaking in the United States, and is not able to devote any great space to Congress. Special aspects of the subject are also dealt with by Miss Follett in her volume on The Speaker of the House of Representatives, and by Doctor McConachie in his treatise on Congressional Committees. But in the book under review we have for the first time a work dealing especially and exclusively with the general question of the conduct of business in our national Legislature, and, fortunately, by one who is himself a member of the body whose proceedings he describes.

The work is an excellent one but not wholly satisfying. It gives clear and adequate answers to the more important questions which arise in the mind of the inquiring reader, and, in general, gives both the reasons for the rules which are explained, and the manner in which

they work out in practice; but not often does the author lift the veil which hides from the vulgar gaze the inside workings of the informal meetings of party leaders, the political considerations which control. the caucus and committee reports, the log-rolling, etc. In result, if not in deliberate intent, the work is a defense of the present method of conducting business in the House, showing as it undoubtedly does the reasonableness of those rules, so often criticised, whereby, upon occasion, the majority may not only override the will of the minority, but quiet their voices when obstructively raised.

Some of Mr. McCall's judgments deserve mention. He believes it would be better if all supply bills were reported from a single committee. He is of opinion that while there is an obvious advantage in having the "government" directly represented on the floor of the House as is the case in Great Britain, the difference between the two systems in actual practice is easily exaggerated. In fact, it is suggested that through the examination and cross-examination of executive officials the supply committees of Congress are likely to discover abuses in administration which would not be revealed were the formation of the bills wholly in the charge of department chiefs. That the Senate should, and ultimately will be forced to restrict debate by the introduction of the closure in some form or another, Mr. McCall is convinced. That he views with apprehension an increase in the powers of the president, or an increase in national supervisory authority without diminishing the president's present powers, is evident. Perhaps as to this his language should be quoted. "Our history has repeatedly shown," he says, "that the tremendous power that comes from the filling of offices, enables the president practically to control the nominations of his party under the caucus and convention system, and that as a rule, it is the more effective for this purpose, the more unscrupulously it is employed. If we would add to this the power that may come from inquisition into the business affairs of the private citizen through an extreme extension of the national inspection system, we put into the hands of the President the infallible means of increasing supreme control of his party. The two would ideally supplement each other, and we would have both a system of rewards and a system of punishment. With many loosely defined statutory crimes, and a great engine of prosecution in the hands of one unscrupulous man, the petty pilferings of the ordinary political grafter would soon become insignificant. Then would begin to dawn again the era of corruption on a grand scale, when men would purchase immunity by enormous

campaign gifts and by political obsequiousness to a personal will, and we should have an ideal system for levying political blackmail."

In the first chapter there is injected a discussion of the constitutional extent of the treaty-making power, a more restricted scope to that power being urged than the precedents and dicta of the Supreme Court would seem to warrant.

The lectures upon which the work is based were delivered during the winter of 1908-09. There are, however, brief footnote references to the changes in the rules made by the 61st Congress.

Précis de Droit Administratif et de Droit Public, Septième Edition. By MAURICE HAURIOU. (Paris: Larose and Tenin, 1911. Pp. xii, 1010.)

This is a new edition of a well-known work by the distinguished professor of administrative law in the University of Toulouse. Although intended as a manual for university students, it makes a volume of over one thousand pages and treats with great detail the subject of administrative law and to some extent constitutional law. As the character and scope of the work may be presumed to be generally known to American students of administrative law, no attempt will be made here to do more than point out the important changes that have been embodied in the present edition. In the first place, he has added a book of 130 pages on "Le Contentieux Administratif" which he defines as "l'ensemble des régles relatives aux litiges organisés que suscite l'activité des administrations publiques" and which he distinguishes from juridiction administrative. He points out that in France the contentieux administratif is exercised entirely by a special class of tribunals whereas in certain other countries it is exercised by the ordinary courts. In this new book are discussed the various kinds of administrative controversies, how questions of conflict are raised, the organization and procedure of the tribunal of conflicts, the separation of administrative jurisdiction from administration, actions of recourse and the general character of administrative procedure.

Another feature of the present edition is the omission of the preliminary discussion of the general notions of public law which was a part of the preceding editions, and the substitution of a book devoted to a discussion of the administrative régime of the state in which are

discussed the subjects of administrative organs, the distinction between loi and règlement, administrative jurisdiction and the limits of administrative law.

The chapter on the police has been enlarged by an extended discussion of the police des cultes made necessary by the law of December 9, 1905, by which the separation of Church and State, was effected, by a discussion of the police du repos hebdomadaire made necessary by the Sunday observance law of July 13, 1906, by a section on the "police of navigable waters," and one on the "administrative aspects of the workingman's insurance law of April 10, 1910." The chapter on the recruitment of functionaries has been entirely rewritten, while that on the public domain has likewise been extensively revised. Finally, the treatment of the contentieux administratif has been revised to conform with the changes made in the organization of the council of state in 1910.

For more than ten years, M. Hauriou's book has been a standard treatise on administrative law for French students and its popularity is attested by the fact that it has rapidly gone through numerous editions. Now that he has written a companion volume on the Droit public, the size of the work here reviewed might be reduced with advantage and the volume otherwise improved by transferring to the former work the discussion of matters of constitutional law, such, for example, as that which deals with the legislature (pp. 242252) and similar subjects.

J. W. GARNER.

Short Ballot Principles. By RICHARD S. CHILDS. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1911. Pp. viii, 171.)

"So those who would increase the margin of safety in our democracy must estimate, with no desire except to arrive at truth, both the degree to which the political strength of the individual citizen can, in any given time, be actually increased by moral and educational changes, and the possibility of preserving or extending or inventing such elements in the structure of democracy as may prevent the demand upon him being too great for his strength."

The last phrase of this quotation from Graham Wallas' "Human Nature in Politics" expresses fairly well the point of view of a note

worthy little book in which an American author has now attempted to deal with some of the problems of democratic government in this country. Mr. Wallas sought to substitute for the old-fashioned intellectualist conception of human nature which accompanied the democratic theories of the eighteenth century a new political psychology based on unflinching examination of real political conditions. Similarly, Mr. Childs in his "Short Ballot Principles," though dealing with a more concrete and limited field, seeks to see human nature as it actually manifests itself in everyday political action.

Starting from this as a foundation, he devotes the bulk of his book to a discussion of the means by which our governmental machinery may best be adapted to the facts of human nature as thus discovered, rather than to a set of catch phrases too generally supposed by Americans to represent the wisdom of the fathers and the Alpha and Omega of political truth. This method of approach is still uncommon enough in books dealing with American politics to be distinctly refreshing. The discussion loses none of this refreshing quality from being written in Mr. Childs' very individual style-as may be gathered from the following quotation, taken from the second chapter: "No plan of government is a democracy unless on actual trial it proves to be one. The fact that those who planned it intended it to be a democracy, and could argue that it would be one if the people would only do thus and so, proves nothing-if it doesn't 'democ,' it isn't democracy!" "And I will ask you to agree as a result of this chapter of fancies, that democracy has limits-many limits,-and that overstepping some of these limits may result in oligarchy.

"From this point of view we will move nearer to our subject, and see whether our American form of government has not at some points gone beyond the limits of practicability."

So much for his major premise. In the next few chapters he seeks to define some of the most important of these limitations and, in so doing, outlines the now familiar doctrine of the short ballot-that elective offices must be few, important and interesting in character, or, as he summarizes it, that "each elective office must be visible." From this point on, however,-except for the long chapter on "Fits and Misfits" in which he illustrates his theory of the limitations of democratic government by applying it to various concrete types of city, county and state government-he branches out from the short ballot principle and attempts to establish various corollaries,