Former Under-Secretary of State, von Delbrück said before the National Assembly--speaking, it is true, of the Economic Council to be organized by the Constitution, but the Provisional Economic Council is nevertheless its precursor--that the Economic Council is without doubt, by the side of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat, a third legislative assembly. For such an assembly, “called upon to deliberate on the most important questions in the national life, will necessarily have a natural tendency to enlarge its powers. We are undoubtedly on the eve of a period in which the Reichstag and the Reichsrat will be considered as one side of a balance, and the Economic Council as the other. Behold in this a wholly new political evolution. There will come a day when the Economic Council will seek to become the heir of the Reichsrat and to take its place.” Will this prediction be realized? It will if the Economic Council is able to render the government and the people the services they expect of it. It will not if it does not deserve to be heard by them and does not know how to make itself heard. SECTION II SOCIALIZATION In order to reconstruct in Germany the public and private economy destroyed by the war and the revolution, it is not enough to give the producers a special right to co-operate in the regulation of economic questions; nor to recognize particularly for the working class the right of co-deliberation in the determination of these matters. It is hoped that such measures will increase production. But it is also necessary that no part of production be lost and that all of it be utilized to the utmost for the community. One is thus led to inquire whether the system of production and the distribution of wealth, such as prevails under a capitalist régime, is capable even if improved, of attaining such an end; whether it were not better to substitute a new system, socialist or not, giving the utmost guarantee that production will benefit the entire community. We must inquire what attitude the Constituent Assembly took on this question and what solution it adopted. 1.--THE PROBLEM OF SOCIALIZATION. On the morrow of the Revolution, power passed entirely into the hands of socialists, that is to say, by definition, men whose programme may be summed up in these words: the abolition of private property and the taking over by the state of all the means of capitalist production. The Independents undoubtedly would have set about at once the task of realizing this programme. But we have seen that they had but a brief period of power; and the Social Democrats seemed less in a hurry to keep their promises.