Suchergebnisse

One of the results of the passage of the manhood suffrage law of 1925 in Japan has been the rise of proletarian parties and the election of eight of their candidates as members of the Diet. In the House of Representatives these new members find themselves in the company of half a dozen minor parties and a group of independents, alternately ignored and courted by the two major parties. Their appearance coincides with a time when liberal opinion in Japan favors the two-party rather than the multiple-party system. But the economic significance of the new parties has saved them from the aspersion of merely adding to the confusion of minor groups. Moreover, the failure of Japanese liberals to develop a great party of liberalism invites a new association to seize a vantage ground so long unoccupied.On the eve of the general election of 1928 the founders of the proletarian parties had reason to hope that careful strategy in the campaign would give the new parties a good start upon the same road that led the Labor party in Great Britain to the leadership of the parliamentary opposition and finally into office. The manhood suffrage act had increased the electorate from 3,341,000 to 12,534,360. Among the nine million new voters are included practically all the male factory toilers and agricultural workers. Here, indeed, is a rich field for proletarian vote-getting.

The contemporary criticism in England of the traditional theory of the state can conveniently be traced to the famous introduction of Maitland to the fragment of Gierke. It is significant to note that Maitland's analysis followed by one year the classic restatement of the orthodox view by Bosanquet, thus perhaps offering another illustration of the common observation that when a doctrine has received its fullest elaboration, its decline has already set in. During the first twelve or fifteen years of the present century, this criticism became an important undercurrent of political thought, as shown by the emergence of Distributivism and Guild Socialism, the passing of the zenith of the conventional Fabianism with the publication in 1909 of the Minority Eeport on the Poor Law, and the publication of Figgis's Churches in the Modern State in 1913. This later view was as yet, however, only an undercurrent; for the main stream of thought as indicated by L. T. Hobhouse in his Liberalism (1911) did not show any effects of the new leaven. Only during the next decade, say between the publication of Russell's Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916) and Professor H. J. Laski's Grammar of Politics (1925), did the novel movement become the main current. Viewed in wider perspective, Russell, Hobhouse, the Webbs, Tawney, Cole, Laski, and Hobson offer variations on the same theme. The completeness and comprehensiveness of Professor Laski's Grammar of Politics make it especially significant. The book is, in fact, a summary of the development of English thought since 1900.