Fear of concentration of power in the hands of one group or one person has written into many constitutions in the past hundred and seventy years or more a variety of safeguarding provisions against uncontrolled and arbitrary exercise of authority. Revolutionary leaders in America, conscious of the abuses of power against which they had successfully taken up arms, attempted to protect all future generations by incorporating into new covenants and fundamental laws salutary checks against tyranny. While for the most part the authors of the American fundamental law had not been the idealistic, enthusiastic leaders of the Revolution, they were sufficiently imbued with revolutionary thinking and ideology to incorporate checks against concentrated power in the Constitution. It is true that they feared different tyrants: the common sense of Madison could see tyranny in the uncontrolled demos of urban centers; the penetrating intellect of a James Wilson could see it in the preponderant influence of an aristocracy; the unstable and emotional Patrick Henry could see it in any form of strong government. All the framers of our fundamental law were on the look-out for tyranny. Their minds ran naturally to checks against one group or another, or one governmental institution or another.

Three hundred years ago the people of England were engaged is a terrible civil war. Among the young men then about to come of age was Robert Boyle (1627–1691). Except for Newton, he did more than any other Englishman of the late seventeenth century to make Great Britain the center of the great school of natural philosophy, whose achievements Voltaire was to insist constituted one of the chief glories of the age of Louis XIV. Boyle was horrified by war. He regarded it as a disease of human societies. In 1646 he wrote about it from London with touches of wisdom astonishing to hear, especially from a boy of nineteen. He had had conversations with a number of partisans of the House of Commons, with men who were destined to be on the winning side. Those who look forward to victory today as the solution of their troubles might meditate to advantage upon his words.

WaltherRathenau's influence on the beginnings of both war economy and planned economy is generally recognized. In America, however, it is not so well known that two other men besides Rathenau stood at the cradle of these new forms of economic organization. These two men, Josef Koeth and Wichard von Moellendorrf, and their activities between 1914 and 1919 are the subject of this paper.

The name of Peter Tkachev is virtually unknown outside of Russia. Even in Russia his importance in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement received but belated recognition. During his lifetime, he met with strong opposition on the part of the majority of Russian revolutionaries. A hostile attitude towards his personality and his ideas remained predominant in revolutionary circles for a long time after his death (1886). It was only after the revolution that he began to attract more sympathetic attention.

A Word is like a coin. With a particular coin different men at different times purchase goods of the same or very similar value. With a particular word different men at different times designate the same or a very similar value. Every coin in the course of its history is subjected to different changes in value; for the same coin may suddenly obtain more or less in exchange. Exactly thus does the value of a word change; it can at one time denote more, at another less; a more comprehensive or a more restricted concept. And just as for the coin, there comes also for the word the day on which it is “removed from circulation.” As a coin can become valueless, so a word can become senseless, insignificant.