existence, seems to us incompatible with democracy.” (Erkelenz, session of the National Assembly, July 21, 1919. See Heilfron, _op. cit._, vol. vi, p. 4236-4328.) The Councils System was, therefore, rejected by the National Assembly. It must be observed, however, that it did not remain the mere formula of isolated theoreticians. The organizations of the Councils, in line with the plan we have just pointed out, was put forward as the programme of all the Independents and the Communists, and, as we will see, these two parties succeeded in casting 5,337,712 votes in the elections of June 6, 1920, sending 83 deputies to the Reichstag. 3.--THE CHAMBER OF LABOUR OR THE VOCATIONAL PARLIAMENT. There is another project which was rejected in the name of the democratic principle but whose partisans declared to be compatible with this principle--one which in any event under different modalities has determined champions in almost all the parties. That is the plan for the creation of a Chamber of Labour (Kammer der Arbeit) or Vocational Parliament. The idea of granting to vocational interests a special representation is not new, but since the Revolution it has been studied in Germany by a group of publicists and students of politics, who have delved perhaps more profoundly than ever before into the project and have given it a new form by introducing new concepts into it. The supporters of the Chamber of Labour declare that at the present time, in contemporary states, the vital duty of a government is to organize the economic life of the nation. This obligation has particular force in a country whose whole economy had been overturned and ruined by a disastrous war and revolution, and which, unless it decides to enter upon a new road, runs the risk of crashing under the burden of its foreign and domestic debts. In order to reconstruct Germany economically one cannot depend on a political parliament. A study of the history of the parliamentary system brings the conviction that if a parliament has proved to be an adequate organ of political legislation, it is nevertheless admittedly incapable of solving the economic and social problems it encounters. The parliamentary system, that is to say, the system that consists of the formation of a government with the parties of the majority, is much more a product of classical liberalism than the creator of new social and economic forms. All the ideas current to-day and which constitute the guiding principles of our political life, viz., democracy, national sovereignty, the forming of the popular will, division of powers, belong to an epoch in which the economic activity of the state was combatted with passion. When it has created its political system liberalism remains content with forms that answer only to purely political exigences.