PREFACE THE purpose of this volume is to introduce the reader to the problems of constitutional and popular government. Such a purpose cannot be achieved by simply furnishing an outline of the manner in which modern governments are organized. This knowledge the student must, of course, have; it is the material of political thought and is available in a number of excellent text books. But if the student is to derive any real value from the information which he has, he must have some appreciation of the place of politics in the social sciences; the right of the State to be; the sphere of state control; the practical problems with which all constitutional and popular governments are confronted; the manner in which States of the modern world have attempted to solve these problems; the relation of different political institutions and agencies to each other (for example, the analogy between the Congressional Caucus and the British Cabinet), and the reasons for their apparent success, or failure to achieve the ends for which they were instituted-in a word (although it may be a too ambitious way of stating our task), the principles behind the facts. Such a theoretical insight is, we venture to think, of more value than a meticulous knowledge of one or more governments. It is of greater importance for the student to appreciate the nature of federal government than it is for him to know the intricacies of congressional procedure. Again, the control of foreign policy, a problem common to all modern governments and nowhere satisfactorily settled, is much more vital than the details of administrative reorganization in the United States. The comparisons may be |