Before the Revolution he belonged to the Progressive Party; after which he joined the Democrats. Under-secretary of State for the Interior, on February 15, 1918; Minister of the Interior in Scheidemann’s cabinet of February, 1919; representative of the government at the National Assembly to discuss the Constitution when, in June, 1919, he left office; it was on him from the beginning to end that the chief burden of these discussions rested. Master of constitutional law he showed himself in politics essentially a realist. He fought stubbornly for the ideas he put forward in his first draft--the necessity of unifying the Reich and dismembering Prussia, the need of creating confidence in democracy, the superiority of a parliamentary régime. He fought for these to the very end with vigour of argument and such fertility of resources that the greater part of his ideas survived every attack. Certainly the definitive text of the Constitution is quite different from his original project; Preuss did not underestimate the forces and influences with which he had to deal; nevertheless he won great support on his principal issues and he is really the chief artisan of the work of Weimar. The Constitution was adopted on July 31 by a vote of 262 for and 75 against. Those who voted against it were the German Nationalists, the German People’s Party, The Independents, The Bavarian Peasant Union, and several members of the Bavarian People’s Party, among them Dr. Heim. It was promulgated and published on August 11, 1919, and became operative at once. Having concluded peace and adopted the Constitution the National Assembly, it would seem, should have dissolved. But it did not. It had the authority to fix the duration of its mandate. The Assembly considered that its work was not finished on August 11, 1919, two tasks still remaining to be accomplished; the first of these to draw up and pass the principal laws needed for the application of the constitution. The latter in a number of its provisions necessitated the passing of a series of special laws and ordinary laws regulating details which, in the course of the deliberations on the Constitution, the members could not find time to enact or on which they had not been able to agree. Among such were laws regulating the election of the Reichstag and of the President of the Reich, laws on initiative and referendum, on the state of siege, the army, Workers Councils, and Economic Councils, laws regulating the transfer of railroads and postal systems of the various states to the control of the Reich, etc.