It was argued that 1 in the Reichstag the members of the non-material vocations, like lawyers, editors and journalists, together with party secretaries and professional politicians, preponderated, while the representatives of finance and industry and the class of artisans were represented in but a small measure, and only agriculture showed any appreciable amount of real vocational representation. For this reason the vital economic questions of the nation were solved from the party standpoint rather than from the standpoint of technical knowledge and of the experts. These parties exercised a tyranny of ignorance. They proceeded, not from the previous perception of a grouping of various economic and social interests in the nation, but from an attempt at representing the citizens, without discrimination or differentiation, according to a world-conception (Weltanschauung) or a scheme of individual and social values derived from the excogitation of the study. Actuated by a principle, considered and designed to represent the General Will of the community, the parties tended to forget the concrete interests of groups in debate, and the substance of legislation was then dominated by the idea of a ruling majority of citizens. The parties dealt for the main part in abstract citizens-" they allowed themselves to count individual persons and their power of work like mark-pieces." 6 True it was that the parties, except the Centre, could show the characteristics of internal vocational grouping-indeed, whatever of usefulness had been accomplished in Germany had been accomplished by this expert element; but then the world-conception" 1 Oppeln-Bronikowski, Reichswirtschaftsrat und berufsständischer Gedanke (Berlin, 1920), p. 8.

5

2 Dr. Josef Grunzel, Der Sieg des Industrialismus (Leipzig, 1911), p. 158.

3 Dr. Emil Lederer, "Das ökonomische Element und die politische Idee im modernen Parteiwesen," Zeitschrift für Politik, Band V. Heft 4, 1912, p. 535 ff. 4 See reference 6 below.

5 Ibid.

6 Prof. Max Wundt, "Parteien oder Stände," in Deutschlands Erneuerung (Munich,

May 1919), p. 333 et seq.

i Ibid. p. 335.

and the desire to attract majorities with millennial programmes and maintain power had extinguished the objective operation of such internal organisation and expertness. The slogans of the parties had done little to give the equally enfranchised citizens an insight into economic actualities 2 and a power over the economic activities of the State. The period of Manchesterism and Polizeistaat could well have been served by such a party system, and parliamentary action with party manœuvres to secure majority resolutions in accordance with a previously established mental attitude. But in the present period of the rendering of positive services by the State, knowledge and expertise were at least as important titles in the creation of political decisions as the declaration of will based, in the last resort, upon the electoral process and the early nineteenth century conception of representation.

The force of these arguments, stated by different men at different periods, was given point by no less an authority than Jellinek in an influential study.5 He showed that Parliaments were in all countries giving over their powers of concerting decisions to other bodies, like special committees, derived from them, and that many of the propositions for constitutional amendment in France had been directed to bringing the deputies into a more close legal dependence on the electors. "If, then," he said, "you go to the heart of these matters (relating to the system of representation of citizens by the territorial constituency), it will be discovered, that no political scheme is so built upon fictions and so out of correspond

1 Rehm, Deutschlands politische Parteien, P. 16. 2 Grunzel, op. cit. p. 157.

3 Dr. August Müller, "Wirtschaftsvertretung und politisches Parlament," in Die neue Zeit (May 6, 1921).

4 Note W. v. Möllendorff, Deutsche Gemeinwirtschaft, Berlin, 1916: "The economic influence of political parties was higgled over according to the model of the marketing of goods. The manner and the result of disputes were not settled by the economic experts, but either by the previously existing extra-economic creed, or, and this more often, by the strength and conditions of secret self-seeking."

5 Verfassungsänderung und Verfassungswandlung, Berlin, 1906.

Such

ence with ideal types as popular representation." representation meant the party system, and that again meant the emergence of a desire for partisan power which diminished the excellence of legislation. Moreover, people with expertise did not necessarily get elected. He then noted that "the days when the Parliamentary tribune was the only place from which could emanate influence on Governments have long ago passed away." The Press had its influence. But a more important phenomenon was the rise of associations of all sorts-" instead of the atomised mass of nation there was to-day a profuse grouping, almost impossible clearly to apprehend." 2 The future lay perhaps with the organisation of the will of these various associations. The idea of representation could be better worked out and expressed as the interests of the groups were more definite.3 Already many of the organisations had official duties, and perhaps John Stuart Mill's idea of having a legislative committee, but containing the representatives of interested groups concerned, could be adopted. This committee would have direct relations with the Government. "It would be the duty of the latter to balance against each other the demands of the various parties, and the central Parliament would have, with much more limited competence than to-day, to take up in its own bosom the settlement of interests, by way of assent or rejection." 5

1 Op. cit. p. 64.

4

2 Ibid. p. 79.

3 Cf. Cole, Social Theory, chap. iv. and vi.; Webb, Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, Pt. I. chap. iii.

4 Cf. Representative Government (Everyman Edition), p. 237 ff.: "Any Government fit for a high state of civilisation would have as one of its fundamental elements a small body, not exceeding in number the members of a Cabinet, who should act as a Commission of legislation, having for its appointed office to make the laws. If the laws of this country were, as surely they will soon be, revised and put into a connected form, the Commission of Codification by which this is effected should remain as a permanent institution, to watch over the work, protect it from deterioration, and make further improvements as often as required. No one would wish that this body should of itself have any power of enacting laws: the commission would only (oh! irony !) embody the element of intelligence in their construction; Parliament would represent that of will."

Given this criticism of representation and the work of Parliament, it can be no matter for surprise that reform of German parliamentarism took place, as later it did, on lines allowing for the direct impact of representatives from the various associations upon the legislative and administrative work of the central authority, and even, as will be seen later, upon the governmental sphere of the local authorities.1

But this development was made the more certain by two other political factors: first, the positive saturation of German political theory and institutions with the conception of estates and vocational or, generally, group representation; and second, the increasing dependence of the Chancellor and the Departments upon agencies other than their training, and Parliament for the knowledge necessary to framing policy.

During the nineteenth century,2 when the equal and general franchise were being extended in England and France, the mediaeval institution of Estates, adapted to new conditions, served as an important subject of political thought in Germany. In the various Germanic States from the Middle Ages there had been the representation of prelacy, knighthood, nobles and towns. This order lasted down to the close of the eighteenth century and the dissolvent period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Even then most of the new State constitutions drawn up between the Treaty of Vienna and 1848 provided for a representation of specific estates in their Upper Chambers. Everywhere, for instance, the small landed proprietorship, as a group within the State, was recognised as having a right to be so represented. The conservative political thinkers (afterwards powerfully influencing the Conservative parties), i.e. those thinkers antagonistic to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and its underlying political and social

1 See post, Chapters VI. and VII.

2 Cf. Herrfahrdt, Das Problem der berufsständischen Vertretung, Berlin, 1921.

assumption of natural rights, maintained the tradition of representation of the forces of society by estates. The principle was accepted from history and contemporary institutions, though it needed restatement in accordance with the new stratification of society. Further, apart from the historic argument, natural rights theorists proceeded to deduce from the ideas of a social contract a theory of representation which would secure to each class of the population its proper weight in the Diet. That is to say, given that the people was sovereign and should be represented, an attempt was made to estimate proper weight of representation not by the giving of equal votes to undifferentiated citizens, as would have been done in the equalitarian republic of Rousseau, but by the previous assessment of the political worth and importance of the citizens to the society: this in order that intelligence (or rather, education) might be given a slight superiority over the masses, and that no specific independent branch of human activity should be either excluded from representation or over-represented.

These ideas did not die with the Liberal revolutionary movement of 1848, which was based essentially on the levelling and atomisation of the citizens in relation to their political system. The theory of an organic grouping of society which would find its expression in representation is to be found in the works of August Winter (1852),1 Karl Christian Planck (1881),2 R. C. Mohl (1860), and Schäffle (1894). All of these writers based their variously composed and variously empowered systems on vocational and other forms (e.g. university, church, towns) of grouping.5 Here, then, was a theory, always important in the Conservative armoury, ready,

1 Die Volksvertretung in Deutschlands Zukunft.

2 Testament eines Deutschen; and 1918, Der Berufsstaat (remains brought together by Planck's daughter).

3 Staatsrecht, Völkerrecht und Politik, i. 408 et seq.

4 Das Problem der Wirtschaftskammern, and Volksvertretungsprobleme.

5 A good summary is given in Tatarin-Tarnheyden, Die Berufsstände, ihre Stellung im Staatsrecht und die deutsche Wirtschaftsverfassung (Berlin, 1922), p. 113 et seq.