The political party, etymologically and logically, can embrace only a part of the citizenry, politically organized. The party is a fraction; it is pars pro toto. Let us endeavor briefly to analyze its causal origin and its behavior.

According to Max Weber, the political party has a dual teleology. It is a spontaneous society of propaganda and of agitation seeking to acquire power, in order to procure thereby for its active militant adherents chances, ideal and material, for the realization either of objective aims or of personal advantages, or of both. Consequently, the general orientation of the political party, whether in its personal or impersonal aspect, is that of Machtstreben (striving to power).

In the personal aspect, parties are often based on the protection accorded inferiors by a strong man. In the Prussian diet of 1855, which was composed of a large number of political groups, each was given the name of its leader.

Political science is at the parting of the ways. Its foundations have been undermined by the claims of law and jurisprudence, into whose hands it has been deliberately surrendering itself for the past half-century or more, and now its chief strongholds are under fire from the neighboring fields of sociology, economics, and ethics. So severe and so persistent have these attacks become that the time has arrived when the political scientist must decide whether he will allow his subject to be absorbed in any one or all of these various fields, or will attempt to reëstablish it as a distinctive discipline.

The reasons for this state of things are not difficult to discover. They quite obviously lie in the fact that in the pursuit of their basic problem—the search, namely, for the nature and source of sovereignty—political philosophers have so generally followed two equally futile and fruitless paths: either the path of pure speculation leading to a supernatural or metaphysical theory, or the path of legal analysis, leading ultimately to the juristic theory of the state. Indeed, during these recent years political theory has been so increasingly “under bondage to the lawyers” that it is little wonder that a reaction has come, and that thinkers in their determination to find the reality behind the formal juristic conception, are now repudiating not only the legal, but even the political, character of the state.

All living organisms, no matter how minute or insignificant, when examined through the microscope, appear enormous, intricate, and extraordinarily active. Similarly, the world at large, when considered through the microscope of contemporary analysis, has no doubt, at all historical periods, struck its immediate witnesses as being infinitely complex and eventful. Is it, then, a mere delusion if the flow of recent and current happenings impresses us as being exceptionally uneven and rapid in its course, as resembling indeed a swollen Alpine torrent at the melting of the snow in the spring?

I believe not. I believe that, even viewed in the perspective of centuries, the last ten years will be characterized by the future historian as an epoch of extraordinarily numerous and radical changes.

To consider the world in its political aspects only, what previous decade has witnessed as many momentous events as the last? The final, decisive struggle and the end of the greatest war that has ever taken place. In Europe alone, the crumbling of four of the most powerful monarchies. The setting up or resurrection of seven or eight new or reborn sovereign entities.

The past year of Japanese politics has witnessed several developments in parliamentary government, prominent among which are the contest between the privy council and the cabinet, the question of the reform of the Peers, and the reorganization and growth of parties on the eve of the first general election under the manhood suffrage law.

During the greater part of this time, the Wakatsuki ministry was in office. The strong leader of the Kenseikai, Viscount Kato, who had been called to form a coalition cabinet after the fall of the super-party cabinet of Kiyoura, died in January, 1926. The succeeding premior, Reijiro Wakatsuki, was a man of less prestige. Even before Kate's death, the alliance of all parties in the House of Representatives was dissolved and the Seiyukai and the Jitsugyo Doshikai, or Business-man's party, assumed the rôle of opposition parties.

The events of the past five years in China furnish abundant evidence of the economic background of politics. Hostility between British Hongkong and Chinese Canton may be said to date from the Hongkong seamen's strike of 1922, and it will be remembered that the Shanghai disturbance of 1925, with the resulting popular disorders in other parts of the country, arose out of a series of strikes in Japanese-owned cotton mills of the city. Moreover, the spectacular progress of the Nationalist movement during the past two years is due in no small degree to the widespread economic unrest produced by chronic civil war, interrupted communications within the country, depreciated currencies, unfavorable conditions in the factories, and steadily mounting price levels.

The third of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's “Three Principles of the People,” on which the Nationalist movement as a whole rests, is concerned with economic conditions. The first of the three principles is Ming Zoh, meaning a race or a people, and it is used in connection with the right of a people to exist on a footing of equality with other races or peoples. The prestige enjoyed by Soviet Russia in Kuomintang circles is directly traceable to the willingness of Russia to recognize this principle of Ming Zoh, thereby dealing with the Chinese as the Russians' racial and national equals.

The election of Field Marshal von Hindenburg to the presidency in succession to Ebert in 1925 was at first interpreted by Republicans in Germany, and by many foreign observers, as a distinct political blunder. He was pictured as the very embodiment of pre-war Germany with its ultra-nationalistic and militaristic ideals. It was freely prophesied that all the labors of Marx and Stresemann, MacDonald and Herriot, which had held out the promise that Germany might soon be restored to good standing in the family of nations, would come to naught because of this new manifestation of German incorrigibility. These prophecies, however, have certainly not been fulfilled. Hindenburg has thus far encouraged rather than opposed the efforts of Stresemann to reëstablish an understanding with the Allies, and has undoubtedly gained the approval of millions of Germans who fought bitterly against him during the presidential campaign.

Early in 1926, Premier Mussolini revived the long dormant office of podestà for the municipalities of Italy. Thenceforth the term has been frequently before the public. What is this office? And what is the significance of reviving a long forgotten term as its title?

Divorced from the specialized significance that it had in Italy, the term was used in many places and times, ranging from the fringe of Roman antiquity down to the present day. The word itself, of course, is nothing but the Italian form of the good classical Latin potestas, with its simple meaning of “power.” We may be inclined to believe that the use of such an abstract term to signify the officer who held the “power” in city administration is a late development; yet there is an isolated example in Juvenal (lst-2nd cent, A.D.) where such a usage occurs. Juvenal is discoursing on the vanities of human desires, and is pointing specifically to the downfall of Sejanus, when he asks, “Would you rather choose to wear the bordered robe of the man now being dragged through the streets, or to be a magistrate at (the little towns of) Fidenae or Gabii, rendering judgment on weights and measures?” Some three centuries later, Possidius, in his life of St. Augustine, uses the term in connection with the Donatist controversy.