open to it, but it ought to abstain religiously from any attempt to conduct operations or to frame plans. Any tendency to do so means a drift towards an amalgamation of the three functions, which must be kept distinct in any large business if they are to be properly performed. Any tendency towards fusion inevitably means confusion, for each sphere of work requires an organisation and environment of its own.

'Administration' and 'Technical' connote all the great services of maintenance and supply; and it is their business to ensure that personnel and matériel are ready and fit to perform the work required of them by the Command. These include Personnel, Fuel, Victualling, and Stores. Personnel includes a number of important headings such as entry, recruitment, training, discipline, pay, pensions, leave, recreation, welfare, victualling, and clothing. It should also include a permanent and independent Court of Investigation for all complaints, and an investigatory section to deal with questions of welfare. The principal technical services are hydrography, navigation, engineering, naval construction, gunnery, torpedoes,† electricity, signals, and wireless.

It is a principle of staff work that each service is responsible for its own internal efficiency and methods of business; and the Chief of the Staff is responsible only for the general co-ordination of them all. All these phases of work offer ample field for energy and talent. Even in the Administrative branches, which are generally regarded as less interesting, there is wide scope for study in principles of discipline, improvements in recreation and welfare, systems of accountancy, canteen management, and the conditions of naval pay and service. No one branch is to be regarded as more important than another; like the brain, heart, and lungs, they cannot be compared in terms of importance, for each of the three is complementary to the other two. If there are

* This was one of the deficiencies of staff work at the Admiralty during the latter part of the war. Operations did not always keep Intelligence acquainted with its plans and movements.

This includes electrical work, which might well be attached to engineering. Seamanship might be added, but it is rather an application of other applied sciences to their use at sea. Medicine is a technical service attached to personnel.

no ships and guns, there cannot be any operations; if the operations are badly conducted, the best gunnery will be of no avail; a new technical design may revolutionise operations; and all operations must rest on a basis of sound discipline and good administration.

Two other functions attach themselves to a staffHistory and Staff Training. The object of History is to observe what has been done and reduce it to clear and simple expression. This is an absolute necessity. It is the ledger of the business. There is no greater stimulus to efficiency than an accurate record of the work actually done and the method of its execution; and the want of such a record greatly increases the difficulty of staff work. A Training and Staff Duties Division has therefore been found necessary, to deal with principles of training and staff organisation, and to supervise staff training and the compilation of a staff history and manuals.

In peace, the work of a staff is mainly directed towards the collection of information, the study of operations of war, staff training, and investigation and research. It has been suggested in some quarters that the Naval Staff might be reduced. It has been reduced. The Mercantile Movements Division, the Anti-Submarine Division, the Minesweeping Division, have all been closed; but a Staff must at the very least consist of an Operations Division, an Intelligence Division, and a Secretariat. Moreover, the Naval Staff must have a Planning Division or Section attached to it and detached from current work (witness the experience of 1911-the Agadir incident; also that of 1917 in Convoy and AntiSubmarine work, and Minelaying). These divisions must not be independent, or they will work in opposition to one another (as was shown in 1909-12). They must be co-ordinated under a Chief of the Naval Staff. The C.N.S. must evidently see eye to eye with the First Sea Lord, and must possess weight and authority sufficient to meet the Chief of the Imperial General Staff on the same plane. In fact, he must be the First Sea Lord; witness the experience of 1912-16 and the appointment of Lord Jellicoe as First Sea Lord and C.N.S. in 1917. But the First Sea Lord has other functions to perform, and must therefore be assisted by a Deputy C.N.S., and, if the amount of work requires it, by an

Assistant C.N.S. This is the system which has gradually evolved itself from the Naval Intelligence Department of the eighties, as the outcome of actual war experience. It consists at present of eight divisions. Of these, five, namely, Operations, Plans, Naval Intelligence, Trade (all questions of maritime trade), and Local Defence (local defences, booms, mine-laying and mine-sweeping), are associated with strategy and the conduct of operations; two, the Gunnery Division and Torpedo Division, represent the principal weapons of offence and form a link with the technical departments; one, the Training and Staff Duties Division, deals with general principles of training and staff co-ordination, staff training and the compilation of historical monographs and manuals. Its essential form is based on two principles, namely, a distinction between 'Operations' and 'Administration,' and the attachment of the Office of Chief of the Naval Staff to that of First Sea Lord.

To regard this organisation merely as a naval or military one would be a narrow-minded point of view. It has a far wider aspect. It is a system of control which is found operative to some extent in all great houses of business, and whose study, with a view to its application, not merely to particular branches of industry, but to forms of government, will wonderfully repay study and investigation. It is to the credit of Sir Eric Geddes and Lord Jellicoe that they initiated rapidly and in time of stress a system which brought the war to a successful conclusion. On that great day in November 1918 (very different from Der Tag' as miraged in German toasts), when Admiral Beatty stood on the bridge of the 'Queen Elizabeth' watching in silence the German fleet being led captive into the mouth of the river inseparably associated with his name and fame-in that cloud of thought hovering around him, full of the battle-smoke of four long years of war, there must have loomed, bulky and immense in the background, the shadow, reaching out over all the oceans, of the Office of the Admiralty and the workings of its Staff.

.

ALFRED C. DEWAR.

Art. 8.-THE NEW GERMAN CONSTITUTION.

1. Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches Vom 11 August 1919. Taschenausgabe; Erläutert von Dr F. Giese. Zweite, verbesserte Auflage: Berlin, 1920.

2. The German Constitution. Translated into English. H.M. Stationery Office, 1919.

IN undertaking to provide themselves with a republican constitution, the Germans have assumed a task which, in the happiest circumstances, would have been one of great difficulty. But the document which they have elaborated in adverse circumstances holds the field at present as the constitution under which the largest incorporated state in Europe is organised; and it is of more than passing interest to inquire into the forces which have shaped it, and the form which it has actually assumed under the impact of those forces.

Among the most obvious of the difficulties under which the framers of this document laboured was the extreme pressure of time. The abdication of the Kaiser was officially announced in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1918, and was signed by him at Spa on the following day. The reins thus dropped by the monarch were not taken up by the Bundesrath or Reichstag, but were seized by anarchic committees, self-appointed and exercising local authority only, which arose, as if by magic, in every part of the land. These were the so-called Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils, formed on the model of the Russian Soviets, and aiming at a dissolution of society, similar to that which Lenin had brought about in Russia. The effective opposition to these Red Republicans came from the Majority Socialists, who, joining in the formation of the Councils, laboured from within to ameliorate the system, and eventually succeeded in bringing about the calling together of a National Assembly on the footing of universal suffrage. The elections for that Assembly were held on Jan. 19, 1919. The Assembly met at Weimar on Feb. 8 following, and proceeded at once to regularise the position by adopting a provisional constitution for the new German State. After two days' debate that provisional constitution was adopted by the Assembly, promulgated by its President and treated as

the fundamental law on which the Assembly could ground its authority, and by which it could regulate its proceedings for determining the provisions of the permanent constitution.

The consideration of that more elaborate constitution made, of course, larger demands upon the time of the Assembly. But the work was carried out with astonishing despatch. It was on Feb. 24 that the subject was brought forward in an introductory speech by the Secretary of State for Internal Affairs, Dr Preuss; and the completed document was signed by the President on Aug. 11, 1919, so that less than six months was consumed by the Assembly in discussing and revising the draft and in coming to an agreement upon the final form of the law. This rapid rate of progress was made possible by the concurrence of three conditions which it is not unimportant to bear in mind when passing judgment upon the work of the Assembly.

In the first place, there was something like unanimity upon the main features of the change to be effected in the constitution. In the next place, the universally entertained desire to be clear of the war and to make a fair start with the work of repairing the havoc it had produced was felt by the German people of every class with overmastering urgency. In the third place, the Assembly was provided with a set of drafts embodying all the views it was necessary to take into account, two of which, having some sort of official character, became, naturally and in fact, the centres about which the elaborated document could crystallise. Thanks to these facilitating influences a result was reached within the time limit of an ordinary session of the British Parliament, which, in terms at least, remade the German State, converting it from a crowned federation of German States into a democratic organisation of the German folk.

It probably is not generally appreciated in this country how profoundly the political outlook of the German people changed in the course of the war. All shades of political opinion were, of course, entertained in that country before the war; and in the scheme of Government now adopted there is no feature for which