"Politico-social and politico-economic bills of fundamental importance shall, before their introduction, be laid by the government of the Reich before the national economic council for its consideration and report. The national economic council has the right to propose such bills itself. If the government does not approve of them, it must nevertheless lay them before the Reichstag, together with a statement of its attitude. The national economic council is empowered to have the bill advocated before the Reichstag by one of its members. "Powers of control and administration can be conferred upon the workmen's and economic councils over matters lying in their sphere of action." Thus the "anchor" of the workmen's councils in the German constitution. It is difficult to find in it the importance assigned to it by the Socialists. The national council has, in the last analysis, only such power as the Reichstag may choose to confer upon it. There was no sharp opposition to the article from the _bourgeois_ parties, doubtless due in large part to the fact that, even long before the revolution, the right of workmen to combine and negotiate as organizations with their employers was recognized by everybody, and that Germany, with less than two-thirds of the population of the United States, has roundly three times as many organized workmen. In the circumstance, article 165 did not bring any really revolutionary change. The foregoing is a brief outline of the more important features of the constitution of the German Republic. Considering all the attendant circumstances of its birth--the apathy of the people, the weakness of the government, the disruption of the Germans into factions which bitterly hated and opposed each other, the savage conditions of the peace, following the crushing conditions of the armistice, the disappearance from the political field of most of the trained minds of the old empire, the strength of the elements inspired by purely materialistic and egoistic aims or by a naive trust in the internationalists of other lands, the constant pressure from the enemy--the framers and proponents of the constitution accomplished a national deed of dignity and worth. They might easily have done much worse; it is impossible for one who watched the developments of those trying days to assert that they could have done much better. (The author's acknowledgments are due as to this chapter to Dr. Hugo Preuss, for valuable information as to the course of the deliberations of the various constitutional commissions and for interpretations of the constitution, and to Dr. Fremont A. Higgins, A.M., LL.B. (Columbia), J.U.D. (University of Kiel), who generously gave the benefit of his wide knowledge of German law and bibliography.)