In the first part of this paper, an attempt was made to outline the frame of ideas which guided the founders of the national budget system, and to review the principal factors which have influenced the institutional development of the Bureau of the Budget since its establishment in 1921. The second part aims to give some account of the Bureau's current responsibilities and activities, including its working relationships with Congress and the various agencies of the executive branch.

Perhaps the greatest merit of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 must be found in the stress it laid on the connection between budgeting and executive management. By directing the Bureau of the Budget to “correlate” the estimates of the federal agencies, the law linked fiscal planning with the coördinative responsibilities of the President. Correlation of estimates necessarily involves adjustment—not only of financial demands for different agency programs, but also of organizational form and mode of operations. Such adjustment cannot be decreed blindly. It requires administrative study and analysis. The Budget and Accounting Act rendered this inference explicit by designating the Bureau of the Budget to look into the structural and managerial problems of the executive branch as a continuing assignment. Up to 1939, the designation remained for the most part a mere notice of intent.

The 1944 campaign was the second presidential election in which the ceilings of the Hatch Act were operative, and the first campaign in which contributions from labor organizations were prohibited. It furnishes convincing evidence of the ineffectiveness of these limitations and of the imperative need for complete revision of existing regulations of campaign funds.

The financing of the 1944 campaign was subjected to close study by special committees of both the House and Senate, and their hearings and reports supplement at many important points the reports required by the Corrupt Practices Act. The most controversial issues of the campaign centered about the Political Action Committee of the CIO, and this organization was subjected to close study by both committees. The House committee, headed by Representative Clinton P. Anderson (now Secretary of Agriculture), also stressed the increasing importance and questionable practices of non-party “opinion moulders,” but did not attempt to summarize the total expenditures of the campaign. Senator Green's committee, in addition to studying certain party committees and independent organizations in detail, made a great effort to compile complete data on receipts and expenditures affecting the presidential campaign, and its report makes available what is probably the most complete and accurate over-all picture of the financing of a presidential election ever recorded. The notable recommendations of this committee will be discussed later.

The current slump in the number of university students taking courses in public administration suggests that this is a good time to reflect on what form education for the public service should take after the war. It is highly probable that many university students will again undertake to prepare themselves for jobs and careers in government, despite an inevitable reduction in the number of federal employees. Educational assistance to veterans may, in fact, cause a large and sudden increase in the numbers attending colleges and universities with an eye to a government job after graduation. I should like to discuss the kind of education which should be offered such students after the war, whether or not they are veterans. My comments are directed primarily toward undergraduate instruction. The advanced work on administrative theory and problems carried on by graduate faculties and candidates for the Ph.D. is a separate subject.

Basically, the problem of education for the public service involves two questions. First, what are the most important demands which the public service makes upon the individual? Second, how can the universities contribute most to developing the qualities needed to meet these demands?

The demands which the public service makes upon the individual are many and varied. They cannot all be anticipated in advance; and if they could be, there would not be time in the university to give specific training for meeting all of them. Thus some determination must be made as to the kind of demands that are most important. Such a determination was, in fact, being made before the war by university faculties teaching public administration and political science. Students preparing for the public service were being asked to spend an increasing amount of time in the study of techniques, procedures, and skills currently in use in governmental practice. Most prominent among these were personnel management, budgetary and fiscal administration, accounting, statistics, government procurement practice, office management, and similar subjects.

The Charter of the United Nations, signed at San Francisco on June 26, 1945, was the culmination of long and wide preparation. It is to be doubted whether any international instrument, or perhaps any human document, had ever before undergone such wide popular scrutiny, such intensive expert study, and such democratic procedure of adoption. It seems to be accepted, too, that in no country were preparatory studies undertaken upon so large a scale as in the United States.

At the Dumbarton Oaks conversations, each of the four states there represented offered the results of its studies in a plan submitted for consideration; and these, as the result of previous comparison of views, varied little in their fundamentals. The United States plan had been submitted to the three other Governments on July 18, 1944. Since it was in constitutional form and in more detail, it became the basis of further development, although all four plans were thoroughly discussed and parts of all were included in the final Proposals.

Toward the close of the San Francisco Conference, Czechoslovakia's Jan Masaryk remarked that his feeling toward the new Charter “was much like that of the father fondly awaiting the birth of a son. The baby finally arrives and it turns out to be a girl. At first the father is somewhat disappointed, but he soon learns to like her just the same.” While the delegates as a whole believed that their work would go down in history as one of the great documents of all times, many no doubt shared Masaryk's view. For when a document as comprehensive as the Charter is framed, no one gets exactly what he wants.

The article of the Charter that raised the most controversy at San Francisco and the article that epitomizes the nature of the Organization, perhaps more than any other, is the Yalta formula for voting in the Security Council. So heated did the debate on this issue become that Room 223 in the Veterans Building, where the meetings of Committee III/l were held, was dubbed the “Madison Square Garden” of San Francisco. The frankness and candor with which the delegates exchanged views constitutes, in many respects, a good example of international democracy in action.

It is the purpose of this paper to review the action taken at San Francisco with respect to the Yalta voting formula and to point out the relationship of that formula to the special position of the great powers in the new Organization.

A plan for the peaceful settlement of international disputes is the very heart of any charter establishing an international organization to maintain peace and security. Greater emphasis may be given and greater popular interest may attach, particularly in time of war, to provisions for the joint use of national economic and military forces in restraint of aggression. Yet it must be admitted that peace and security are most completely assured when the necessity for resort to collective force does not exist, and when nations, like individuals in a well-ordered society, settle their differences by peaceful means.

Any full understanding of the provisions for the pacific settlement of disputes contained in the Charter of the United Nations would, of course, require an analysis of our total historical experience in the development of principles, procedures, and institutions for this purpose. In particular, an analysis of the League system and its actual operation, and of the reasons why it failed, would seem necessary. For whatever we do today must find its chief justification in the conviction that in our present endeavor we are profiting from the experience of the past and are creating a system which has a better chance of success than its predecessors. Space, however, does not permit the detailed analysis of our historical experience which is necessary to a satisfactory evaluation of the San Francisco achievement. The reader who wishes to explore this historical background more fully is referred to the extensive literature dealing generally with peaceful settlement of disputes, and more particularly with the League experience.

The Security Council of the United Nations will, from the first day of its existence, include in its membership all of the great powers. The Council, backed by the united will of the five powers with permanent seats in that body, will act, if it acts at all, with an authority which no organ of the League of Nations ever possessed. In the League Council, there was no time during which all of the great powers participated. Only two of them, France and the United Kingdom, were League members throughout its period of activity. Some may believe that too high a price, or a higher price than was necessary, was paid to insure the participation of the Five Powers, and especially the United States and the Soviet Union, in the United Nations Organization. The price was paid largely in provisions of its Charter relative to the maintenance or restoration of international peace and security which circumscribe carefully the situations in which the Security Council can take action.

No reference was made in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals to colonial questions, and this, the most important omission among the subjects covered in the Covenant of the League of Nations, brought forth immediate comment. There was, first of all, the problem of those territories held under mandate as part of the League of Nations system. They were all under the administration of members of the United Nations, except for the former German islands in the North Pacific, which were under mandate to Japan. If the new organization was to supplant the League, some formal changes would, in any case, be required.

A second problem was the disposition of such territories as had been taken from Italy and would be taken from Japan. If the self-denying ordinances of the Atlantic Charter and the Cairo Declaration were to be taken literally, there would be territories to dispose of which could hardly be turned into colonies.

Finally, the unfortunate experiences of many European states during the earlier years of the war in the Asiatic and Pacific territories under their control had caused a large amount of discussion of colonial questions. The belief had been voiced in various quarters that colonial administration needed modernizing, that self-government of the natives was not always their goal, and that colonial problems should be considered as international problems and not merely problems of individual colonial powers. Some of these powers looked upon the United States as the center of anti-colonial feeling, and even went so far as to suspect the United States Government of a desire to force changes on them. It was held by some groups in the United States that, as these colonies would be freed largely by American arms, the United States thereby would acquire some responsibility for their future. As the war situation improved and the colonial powers began to think about a peacetime future, they started to make tentative schemes for colonial reform which might avert any sort of outside intervention or internationalization. The British Colonial Development and Welfare Bill, the French proposal to unite all colonies in a “union” with the metropole, the Dutch proposal for a federalized state, all seemed related to the anti-imperial trend of the early days of the war.