Tendencies Toward Ministerial Responsibility in Germany

When asked, “How far do you regard the present constitutional system of the Empire final?†Bismarck is said to have replied, “Final it is not. Doubtless we shall pass through the stages which you in England have passed through. But it will be a slow, gradual process, and we cannot foresee the direction which development will take.†That judgment expresses a strong belief in the evolution of constitutional government,—an evolution, moreover, which in general must follow the course of English political development, but which will doubtless unfold very slowly and reflect in its details the influences of special circumstances and local tendencies. To the general propositions which the Iion Chancellor stated, the student of comparative political institutions must give assent. Ever more clearly are we coming to see that the changes in the forms and organization of governments follow an orderly, developmental sequence.The belated evolution of parliamentary government in Germany is entirely explicable from the peculiar centrifugal forces which prevented absolutism, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from accomplishing its great mission of national unity. That work was left to the nineteenth century. The results of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era were; first, the widespread acceptance of the most advanced doctrines of constitutionalism and the adoption, in most of the smaller states of Germany, of constitutions more or less closely modeled on the French Charte; and, second, the dissemination of the idea of German national unity as the only secure protection against foreign aggression.