The ideal common wealth one particular form of government rather than another cannot be considered here. But they know that in general, as the Puritan statesman, John Pym put it, "that form of government is best which doth actuate and dispose every part and member of the State to the common good." Under such a form of government the people of a commonwealth might confidently expect that measure of justice and liberty which the nature of their commonwealth permitted. Whether ideal justice can be completely established in the sovereign states of modern times, however, may well be doubted. To say nothing of other obstacles, the nature of modern states makes it very difficult to establish justice in that great class of cases where the interests of the people of more than one state are concerned. Those who seek the fullest and most complete justice must demand a commonwealth organized on a far broader basis than the contemporary capitalistic and nationalistic states. Their aspirations were most adequately voiced in one of the noble speeches delivered during the World War by Woodrow Wilson. Standing before the tomb of Washington at Mt. Vernon on July 4, 1918, he said: "What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind." NOTES ON BOOKS 1. The significance of the reign of law is discussed from a variety of viewpoints in Roscoe Pound's Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (1922), and Interpretations of Legal History (1923). 2. A. V. Dicey's Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (8th ed., 1915) serves as an introduction, not only to the British Constitution, but also almost equally well to that of the United States. 3. F. J. Goodnow's The Principles of the Administrative Law of the United States (1905) is the best general introduction to the law of public officers, but this phase of the subject has developed so rapidly in recent years that this book needs to be supplemented by a study of the later decisions of the Courts. The special relations between military and civil authority are discussed in G. Glenn's The Army and the Law (1918). 4. The importance of legal processes is made clear by any of the standard treatises on the law of the Constitution, noted in earlier chapters. See especially L. P. McGehee's Due Process of Law Under the Federal Constitution (1906). For the recent cases, illustrating this phase of the subject, see the annual summaries of the decisions of the Supreme Court in cases of constitutional law, formerly prepared by T. R. Powell, latterly by E. S. Corwin, and published from time to time in The American Political Science Review. 5. The most noteworthy attempt by any recent American writer to work out scientifically the relation between civil liberty and self-government is J. W. Burgess's Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (2 vols., 1890). Burgess rendered a solid service to political science by emphasizing the importance of the forms and processes of government, but his treatment of the subject is not altogether satisfactory because of his defective analysis of the problem of self-government. This is clearly evident in his later works, The Reconciliation of Government with Liberty (1915). |