The events of the months, March-April, 1920, demonstrated, they say, the complete incapacity of political powers to surmount any difficulty as soon as it becomes in the least serious. One of them wrote, “The political party is about to become a superfluous organization; it is being ousted or perhaps absorbed by the vocational association.”[25] A new epoch demands new political forms. It is true that it is inadmissible for a certain class of unions to arrogate to itself the right to impose its wishes on a government of the whole people. We must not think, on the other hand, that in the future the unions would renounce the use of means which have hitherto proved to be powerful. There is only one remedy open: to associate the other productive parties of the nation with the political work of the unions; to transform this present irregular and irresponsible political work, such as it is now, into a constitutional collaboration with the government of the state. It is there that the events of the month of March have demonstrated the necessity of changing the present system. These events appear thereby one of the steps which lead from a formal democracy to a real democracy, from a purely political parliamentarism of the past to a politico-economic parliamentarism of the future.
SECTION II
APPLICATIONS
The democratic principle is one of the bases on which the Constitution of August 11 is constructed; more or less immediate applications of it are found in most of the institutions provided for by this Constitution. We shall confine ourselves here to the study of the principal and most direct of these applications.
1.—THE REPUBLIC.
The normal form of a government in a democracy is the republic. It is logical that if the people is sovereign and if all power comes from the people the chief of the state, like its other organs, should be elected by the people and hold his authority by virtue of it. It is true that there may be and that there are democratic monarchies, such as, for example, England. But this juxtaposition of monarchy and democracy, is, from the point of view of theory, difficult to justify and in practice can be maintained only by reducing the effective power of the monarch to almost nothing. Democratic Germany therefore, must be republican. In reality the National Assembly arrived at a republic much less by logical compulsion than through actual necessity; like the French Assembly of 1875, it adopted the republican form because it was difficult for it, if not impossible, to do otherwise. It seems that the great modern democracies do not become republican until monarchy has been demonstrated as impossible. The republic is at the outset only a last resort; and this must be realized and borne in mind.
Before the Revolution nothing in Germany was republican. Almost totally deprived of political spirit and personal judgment the German people had let themselves be convinced that it was only in the hands of the monarchy, the army, and the bureaucracy that the affairs of the nation were best and most safely conducted; and they naturally came to think that the prosperity in Germany in economic and in technical matters, as well as its development in social matters, was undeniable proof of the excellence of the monarchical system. No political party dreamed of incorporating in its program the establishment of a republic. Not even the Social Democrats themselves really believed that the republican form was a thing which the time had come to demand. They even held that the economic and social interests of the working class could be more solidly assured by a powerful monarchy than by a republic and a democracy of “capitalists.”
After the Revolution the situation changed entirely. The sudden and complete bankruptcy of monarchy demonstrated overnight, with all the convincing force of fact, that this monarchy, in spite of its apparent force, was incapable of fulfilling the duties whose accomplishment alone could justify its existence. The powerful monarchy had not had any clear and co-ordinated foreign policy; it had turned against Germany all the active forces of the world; it had shown itself unable to utilize to its full limit the military and economic capacity of the German people for waging a desperate war to an acceptable conclusion; it had not been able to realize indispensable internal reforms. After November 9, one can say that there were no more royalists in Germany; monarchy had become really impossible and the Reich could not continue except as a republic.[26]
Later the monarchist flag reappeared, rallying about it all the deceptions and discontents. During the discussion of the draft of the Constitution the German Nationalists, among them the former Minister Delbrück, declared loudly that they preferred a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy to a republican government; but the other parties did not follow them. In [Article 1] of the Constitution it was decided that “The German Reich is a Republic”; and in [Article 17] that “each state must have a Republican Constitution.”