The Mutual Defense Assistance Program represents the military portion of an important foreign policy of the United States, that of aid to free nations. While assisting allies by grants of money and supplies is by no means a new undertaking, even for the United States, the scope of this program, under which expenditures may soon exceed $7 billion annually, makes it a good laboratory specimen to illustrate the impact of a positive foreign policy on the structure of the national government. Furthermore, analysis of the program clearly shows the tremendous changes that have taken place in the methods of formulating and administering American foreign policy since the end of World War II.

For more than a generation prior to 1916, the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy occupied the same building at the seat of government.

In presenting my valedictory to this distinguished Association which has honored me by selecting me as its President, I should like to point out by way of introduction what has happened to this office, and therefore to me, during the past year. I have heard of one of my distinguished predecessors some twenty-five years ago who had little else to do as President of this Association than work all year on his presidential address. This was important work and I have no word of criticism of it. But the Association has changed, and today it leaves to the harried wearer of its presidential toga little time to reflect about the status of political science and his own impact, if any, upon it. An active Association life, now happily centered in our new Washington office, is enough to occupy the full time of your President, and universities as well as this Association might well take note. Therefore, in presenting my own reflections to you this evening in accordance with the custom of our Association, I do so without the benefit of the generous time and scholarly leisure which were the privileges of some of my distinguished predecessors.

Nevertheless I do base my presidential address today upon my own active participation in the problems of government, as well as upon my scholarly experience. I have extracted it in part from the dynamics of pulsating political life. It has whatever authority I may possess after having been exposed these twenty-five years to the cross-fire of politics, domestic and foreign, as well as to the benign and corrective influences of eager students and charitable colleagues.

As I set out to prepare for this combined inaugural and valedictory, I sought a theme worthy of the occasion and within the span of my own limited vision. Notwithstanding the lush crop of “problems” confronting our world and our profession, no suitable theme came readily to mind. I experimented with many, including “Variations on a Theme by Joe McCarthy,” or “Acheson at Armageddon,” or “General MacArthur Fades Again.” But in all such cases the theme was obscured by the variations. And so I've called these remarks “Variations on a Familiar Theme.”

Since 1903 when Frank Goodnow spoke on “The Work of the American Political Science Association,” no less than forty-five presidents have prepared annual speeches on as many different themes. It is interesting to note that of thirteen such speeches up to 1917, only one gave any major attention to international relations. Then, between 1917 and 1924, four of the seven were devoted to an international theme. But during the twenty-six years from 1924 through 1950, only two dealt primarily with international relations.

It is a commonplace to assert that science should be independent of politics. By this one usually means that the search for truth, which is the essential function of science, should not be influenced by political interests, which are the interests concerned with the establishment and maintenance of a definite social order or a particular social institution. Politics as the art of government, that is to say, the practice of regulating the social behavior of men, is a function of will and, as such, an activity which necessarily presupposes the conscious or unconscious assumption of values, the realization of which is the purpose of the activity. Science is a function of cognition; its aim is not to govern but to explain. To describe the world is its object. Its independence of politics means in the last analysis, that the scientist must not presuppose any value; consequently he has to restrict himself to an explanation and a description of his object without judging it as good or bad, i.e., as being in conformity with, or contrary to, a presupposed value. This implies that the statements by which a scientist describes and explains the object of his inquiry must not be influenced by values in which he himself believes.

During the last decade the principal issues of American administrative law have been presented within a framework largely dominated by the recruitment and administration of a military establishment far beyond our normal peacetime complement, by the application of emergency economic controls to that part of our civilian economy normally left to the freedom of the market place, and by the development of security techniques designed to guard against real or fancied dangers of espionage, sabotage and divided loyalties. In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that many of the burning issues of the thirties which aroused leaders of the American Bar Association to storm the citadels of bureaucratic power have seemed to pale into relative insignificance beside the sweep of discretionary authority exercised in the name of national emergency. A society which had scarcely freed itself from the controls born of the Second World War before the threatening clouds brought a re-emergence of the familiar pattern of selective service, priorities and allocation, price regulations and wage orders, could derive small comfort from the niceties of the Administrative Procedure Act as bulwarks for the defense of ancient liberties. Nevertheless, emergency controls account for only a part of the machinery of government, and it is still our hopeful assumption that they are temporary phenomena.

The state of modern jurisprudence is not inaptly reflected in the range of considerations to which this title might give rise. If the illusion of certitude still survived as a legal premise, if the judicial process were conceived in terms of “tidy formulas,” one could feel more assurance that the enterprise itself is meaningful and potentially fruitful. But if the past fifty years have taught us nothing else, they have made us aware of the complex and ambiguous evaluation of alternatives that underlies the judicially enforced command. Even the word “constitutionality,” which once seemed to express a coherent idea, has lost its definable contours as understanding of public law has progressed. The salutary result of all this is that we recognize the great network of imponderables which we must assess before declaring with confidence that a given exercise of governmental power conflicts with our fundamental law. But by the same token uncertainties have been multiplied, and flat statement and prediction have become increasingly hazardous. The penalty of understanding is doubt.

One of the most striking characteristics of modern totalitarianism is the conscious attention which it devotes to the organization and indoctrination of youth. The Soviet dictatorship is unique in having set the pattern of such activity; it has carried it on at a level of intensity and over a span of time unmatched by its now defunct Fascist and Nazi rivals. A third of a century has passed since the Bolsheviks rode to power in 1917; the membership of the Communist Party is today overwhelmingly composed of a generation which not only came of age since the Revolution but which also largely served its apprenticeship in the Young Pioneers and Komsomols. And waiting at the threshold of power is a new generation of approximately 10,000,000 Komsomols and 13,000,000 Pioneers, from whose ranks the Communist élite of the future is to be recruited.

What has been the history of this effort to assimilate and discipline the new generations? What manner of training are they receiving? What values does the present leadership seek to implant in them? What motives operate to induce affiliation with the Komsomols? How is the Komsomol organized? What are the activities of its membership? How are the oncoming waves of Soviet youth relating themselves to the society which has produced them? To what extent are they deeply loyal to the present régime? Is there evidence of disaffection among them, and if so, does this disaffection present any important threat to the stability of the régime itself?

Perhaps it is the absence of a substantial communist opposition in Great Britain that has caused Americans to be less concerned about the reactions of our British allies than of the continental nations to the recent foreign policy of the United States. However, if Americans assumed an almost universal British acceptance of the foreign policy adopted by the United States and formally adhered to by the British Government, the Bevanite revolt of early 1951 administered a sharp jolt. First, in April there were the resignations from the Government of Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Labour, former Minister of Health, and one of Labour's strongest and most popular leaders, Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade and one of the Government's young intellectuals, and John Freeman, a lesser figure but in the significant position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply. Their resignation speeches made it clear that, while the immediate cause of their departure was a new budgetary provision requiring a health service charge for dentures and spectacles, the root of their dissatisfaction lay in the burden of rearmament expenditures accepted by the Government in accordance with the main lines of U. S. policy.

One of the most important powers of the United States Senate—but one largely neglected in studies of Congress—is that of passing upon presidential appointments. At its regular session in 1950, the Senate granted its “advice and consent” to 25,590 nominations and rejected 4; in addition, 6 nominations were withdrawn by the President and 99 were not acted upon. The great bulk of these cases, some 23,056 of them, involved the promotions of military and naval officers, and were routinely approved. Another 1,197 nominations were of postmasters, now appointed after a civil service examination, whose approval by the Senate is pro forma. The remaining 1,446 nominations submitted by the President were for “other civilian” offices. It is with regard to this last group that the function of senatorial confirmation takes on importance. Even this number is much too great for the Senate as a body to consider, and during each session of Congress there are ordinarily less than a dozen contested confirmation cases which require consideration by the Senate itself. In general, no other function of the Senate is so completely delegated to its committees, which in turn act largely on the recommendations of individual Senators with regard to federal appointments within their states.

The relationship of the world of ideas to the world of events would appear to be securely established today. It is generally acknowledged that ideas “have consequences,” and that in turn they are themselves consequences of events. But recent preoccupation with this problem has perhaps obscured an equally fruitful field of investigation, namely, that of the horizontal relationship among ideas in different areas of thought. I propose to examine here the relationship and the consistency between John Locke's general philosophy and his political theory. In the main, this task resolves itself into a comparison and correlation of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke's chief philosophical work, with his Second Treatise of Civil Government, his principal work in political theory; but I have made use also of other writings.

My problem has been considerably complicated by Lock's failure to commit himself unequivocally on several of the most crucial questions to be discussed. He frequently used imprecise language, and, regrettably, sometimes made plainly contradictory statements. These lapses reflect a deep-seated unwillingness in Locke to pursue a line of thought to an unattractive conclusion, both in philosophy and in political theory.

In this article I will attempt to review the operation of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 in terms of its own objectives. Criticisms of the limitations and shortcomings of the Act have been discussed elsewhere. In describing the reformed system and the way it works, it is no part of my intention to impute praise or blame to any of the actors in the drama. As a member of the staff of the Library of Congress, I view the legislative scene with as much nonaxiological detachment as an anthropologist would describe the customs and mores of primitive tribes on some tropical island. Whether or not the system is an authentic expression of democratic government, I am not at liberty to say.

As conceived and formulated by its authors and as enacted by Congress, with some significant omissions, the Act (as I shall henceforth refer to the Legislative Reorganization Act, for the sake of brevity) had the following objectives:

1. To streamline and simplify congressional committee structure.

2. To eliminate the use of special or select committees.

3. To clarify committee duties and reduce jurisdictional disputes.

There presently exists in Japan an entire level of socio-political organization practically unknown to Westerners and little studied by the Japanese themselves until recent years. It comprises one of the lowest units of group organization in rural Japan and, in a practical everyday sense, plays a more immediate and important role in the daily lives of a larger proportion of the Japanese people than do any of the more formal and better known units of organization, such as the village, town, gun (county) or prefecture. This unit is known as the buraku, perhaps best rendered into English as hamlet.

A discipline, like an individual, may in some measure be known by the dilemmas it keeps, or more properly by the manner in which it keeps them.

A central conceptual controversy, probably inescapable for political scientists because of their disciplinary heritage, is that involved in perceiving uniformities in behavior, describing recurring patterns, identifying the determinants and yet reconciling this effort and its underlying premises about the roots of behavior with the liberal, democratic faith in man's individual capacity to determine his own ends, to think rationally and to reach individual and creative decisions. On this faith rests the political structure of rights, the machinery of the democratic electorate, the party system and the values of the constitutional democratic state whose political process we are concerned to describe and analyze. Cultural anthropologists, social psychologists of many disciplinary schools, hard-boiled “realists” in political science, have recently drawn back from determinist or whole-heartedly relativist positions. Some are concerned that political science, in a fresh enthusiasm for empirical research, may become so engrossed with uniformities and determinants that it will obscure or abandon the normative commitments of a democratic polity.

The United States has now had a half-century's experience with the process customarily denominated direct legislation. The phrase usually means, and is so used here, the power of the electorate to participate in the law-making function by voting for or against particular proposals submitted at regular or special elections. The proposals may have originated in the legislative assembly or they may have been submitted through the action of the electorate. There are other procedural details in which the processes in particular states may vary, but here the concern is with the general operation of the system. Perhaps more attention has been devoted to that situation in which the legislature has the option of submitting a proposal or not as it sees fit. It is not thought, however, that this detail would cause any serious difference in the conclusions that are drawn here or the suggestions that are made.

Direct legislation has been associated with the Progressive movement which was active at the turn into the present century. The movement was a protest against a number of activities which were prevalent among the states at that time. One of the protests alleged that the legislatures had become wholly “corrupt” and that consequently it was necessary to “clean” them up. This line of analysis also postulated that the people were “incorrupt” and that if given the opportunity they would “purify” the political activity of their states and even the nation. Direct legislation was looked upon as one of the most significant means by which these goals were to be accomplished.

To depreciate politics—and of course diplomacy—because it is a thing of power, is to engage in the doubtful sport of “criticism without a fulcrum,” if it be not indeed to impute “guilt by association.” Of course, politics is a powerphenomenon: no power, no politics; much politics, much power. We must take it or leave it at that; for politics is, willy-nilly, a pulling or a pushing around of somebody. To be sure, there are degrees of both pulling and pushing and proprieties of each; but complete avoidance of both, there never is. Other things being equal, to be pulled is better, I suppose, than to be pushed. For one's face to another's back is safer, under power tactics, than one's back to another's face. Better still is it to march abreast, all faces forward, even though that formation, too, involves some lateral shoving for deference in a line that is never entirely even.

Nevertheless, democratic politics, of the persuasive, the pulling, sort, is better than Nazi geo-politics, which is the apotheosis of pushing. It is better, too, than Communistic neo-politics, which is a pushing of all who will not be pulled by the ideal of classlessness, involving a lethal kick now and then from Big Brother to all the deviant little brothers up and down the line. In short, power for is less poisonous than power against; and power with makes for more perfection for more persons than does power over.

The “People's Government” at Peking, which has been functioning since October, 1949, under the sponsorship of the Chinese Communist Party, includes a system of disciplinary surveillance over government personnel that in several aspects is reminiscent of one of the world's most remarkable institutions. This is the Chinese Censorate, traditionally a highly systematized organ of administrative and political control that was an integral, and usually a prominent, part of China's governmental structure for more than two thousand years.

The new control system in China bears only a partial resemblance to the old. It is even possible that China's censorial heritage may not have had any part in shaping its development. However, since that heritage may conceivably channel its future development in directions that would be unforeseeable and unexplainable in any other context, it would appear to be desirable to take a fresh look at this long-lived institution. Aside from prospects of future influence, the Censorate, as a unique and, in its setting, a durable solution to the universal and ever-present problem of control in government, has intrinsic significance for students of political science.

There were two changes in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1949 term. Attorney General Tom C. Clark was sworn in as an Associate Justice to succeed the late Justice Frank Murphy on August 24, 1949, after his nomination by President Truman had been approved on August 19 by a vote of 73 to 8. Judge Sherman Minton of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals was nominated to be an Associate Justice on September 15, 1949, to succeed Justice Wiley Rutledge. His nomination was approved by the Senate on October 4 by a vote of 48 to 16, and he was sworn in on October 12. During much of the term Justice Douglas was absent as the result of an accident incurred during the preceding summer recess. The loss of Justices Murphy and Rutledge greatly weakened the liberal alignment of the Court and very positively influenced the decision of a number of doubtful cases contrary to precedents of a recent date.

In times of crisis and transition the common man is a political philosopher. An example of how, as part of the widespread concern with the basic problems of our politics, the learned world and the world of practical politics today find themselves close neighbors, was the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy. That this Congress, meeting in Amsterdam in August, 1948, has been described by Professor F. H. Heinemann of Oxford in an article entitled “The West in Search of a Metaphysics,” may also indicate how those who think in terms of practical political leadership for the West and those concerned with wider inquiries concerning life and nature have not yet found acceptable common answers. On the one hand at the meeting were the Thomists, or Neo-Thomists, who had already at their disposal some twenty-five Thomist periodicals and who were, in general, “the best organized contemporary philosophical school.” There were also the Marxists and socialists, who, although they had recently gained some professorships in the French and Italian universities, aroused no very great interest. A third organized element was that of Unesco, the leadership of which achieved for itself an organizational control to extend over future Congresses and their affiliated activities; yet Unesco, with its attempted promotion of a scientific humanism, failed to make progress toward either the integration of a western outlook or the building of a bridge between East and West. The speech of its director-general, Julian Huxley, advocating his well-known evolutionary humanism, “fell flat,” evincing, as Dr. Heinemann put it, that “this sort of naturalism … is totally inadequate for the solution of the spiritual crisis of our time.” It appeared also that a spiritual regeneration probably cannot be achieved by means which are largely political.

The Problem. Chinese communist leaders generally attribute their conquest of power to the faithful pursuit of effective “mass line” tactics. They now regard a “correct” mass line as the essential prerequisite for the full consolidation of power, for the successful implementation of the ambitious and farreaching policies to which they are committed, and for the ultimate transition from the “people's democratic dictatorship” to the complete socialist order. Recognizing that large numbers of cadres adequately trained in mass line tactics are critically needed for these purposes, the Chinese Communist Party intensified its cadre training program in 1950–1951 to insure that all party (and other public) workers would be carefully indoctrinated in basic Marxist-Leninist mass line theory and practice. Training in mass line tactics ranges in scope from propaganda to public administration, but finds its principal focus in the delicate area of the Party's public relations with the great masses of Chinese people who have yet to be sold on the communist program. The problem is so serious, and the need for a solution so urgent, that the party leadership has temporarily deferred several important social reforms pending the completion of the current cadre training program.