[9] In the German project all signatories of the Hague Convention as well as the new States arisen since the war were admitted. Instead of all authority being assigned to an Executive Council of nine in which the victorious Great Powers reserved themselves a majority of five, the remaining four being elected by smaller States, the German project had the Executive Council elected by a Congress of States, corresponding to the Assembly of Delegates in the Paris project. It also provided a World Parliament of parliamentary delegations. The German project is also more drastic in its provisions for mediation, arbitration, and protection of minorities. It approaches the functions of the League for international social legislation in a much more liberal and constructive spirit.
[10] This article of the Constitution had been amended by the addition of the words in italics: "The generally accepted principles of international law the pronouncements of the League of Nations and the provisions of Treaties have binding force as German Constitutional Law." It has now been amended back by their omission.
CHAPTER VII[ToC]
THE CONSTITUTION
Looking at the new German Constitution, without troubling about its inner meanings, and comparing it with the Constitution of 1871, we are struck at once by the very considerable advance it represents in democratic development. One need not be a constitutional lawyer to assert with confidence that this is the most democratic Constitution possessed by any of the principal European peoples, and to add that it seems to have avoided many of the mistakes that have been marked in other Republican Constitutions, whether American, French, Portuguese or Russian. The President's powers, for example, and the relation of the Ministry to Parliament suggest that Dr. Preuss, the constitutional jurist responsible for its drafting and elaboration, had studied foreign constitutional history with a Prussian thoroughness and a Hebrew perspicacity.
But a closer study of this Constitution will give us a different view of it. And this view will depend on whether we study it in the light of its development from the Revolution or of its difference from the ancien régime. If we compare it with the principles of the revolution we shall be tempted to condemn and reject it, like the German Revolution, as mere camouflaged reaction. It would certainly have been a very different document had it been produced in the first weeks of November. The Revolution, in so far as it had a constitutional conception at all, contemplated a "Räte system" (that is a Council Government), which should secure political power to the proletariat under a Central Committee, on the Russian model. If it had admitted Parliamentary institutions at all they would only have been subordinate to Council control. As to any survival of the old State sovereignties, they were looked on as having disappeared with the State dynasties from which they had originated. Thus the Erfurt proclamation of the Thuringian States on December 10th, 1918, proposed that the motley medley of those petty principalities be unified into one administrative department of a centralised Republic.
But this revolutionary impetus did not last. As power relapsed to the upper and middle classes particularism reappeared. As the flood tide of revolution drained back, the old channels and watersheds appeared again. Every crisis in modern German history, 1848, 1866 and 1870, had been in the main a movement towards national unity that eventually failed in great measure owing to peculiarities of German character and of Germany's circumstances. And this last Revolution of 1918 was to a large extent the same; but whereas the previous movements had been thwarted by Conservative ideals and institutions, and by the citadels of the past, this movement was most embarrassed by its association with Communist ideals and innovations, like the Councils. So much indeed was this national and centralising factor of the Revolution obscured by the international and socialising feature of it that, at the election of the Constitutional Assembly, such questions as to whether the Constitution should be that of a centralised Republic, like France, or a coalition of Republics, like Switzerland, never came before the public at all.