Suchergebnisse

THE editors of the Review of Politics have asked me to do something that is indicated by the title of this informal essay. It is something that I have long had in mind. Substantially I am asked to assess after the passage of almost twenty years the thesis laid down in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. Ordinarily the biography of a book or of a writer's ideas had better, in good taste, be left to others. But I hope that I may be forgiven some notes on the nature of that work, because of their relevance not only to this return to the subject, but because of their relevance as well to what seems to me to be a general change in scholarly attitude toward a central problem: the place of ethics and the place of science in that study which Aristotle named by one word, Politics. It is peculiarly a pleasure to contribute this revision of a position to a journal devoted to the high cultivation of that Aristotelian conception. The distinction already achieved by the Review of Politics is in itself a witness of the changed temper of contemporary thought to a deep concern with political values.

It is interesting that this work by Professor Keith, who is acknowledged everywhere to be the most authoritative of the commentators on the constitutional system of the British Empire, should have appeared at the very moment when the Conference on Dominion Legislation and Merchant Shipping Laws began its sittings in London in October, 1929. If it was intended to guide their deliberations, the publication of the Report of the Conference in February, 1930, shows how widely a conservative statement of the existing law and practice will differ from the new structure of Dominion autonomy, once the Report is accepted by the Imperial Conference, by the Parliament in Great Britain, and by the legislatures of the Dominions. For where Professor Keith saw in the "equal status" of the now classic Balfour Report of 1926 only "exaggerated language," "careless phraseology," and "rhetoric," the Conference took this "root-principle" seriously and applied it throughout. As the Conference contained all the most important legal advisers and civil servants of the governments concerned, besides four Dominion ministers, its report will almost certainly be accepted by the Imperial Conference.The experts recognized only one general principle from Professor Keith's work: that any changes which are to be made in the legal status quo in relation to certain subjects would have to be accomplished by acts of the British Parliament. These subjects are: (1) disallowance and reservation, (2) the extraterritorial operation of Dominion legislation, (3) the over-riding powers of British legislation laid down by the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865, (4) the right of Great Britain alone to legislate on royal titles and the succession to the throne, and (5) the making of basic changes in Merchant Shipping and Colonial Courts of Admiralty Acts.