[J] This article of the Constitution had been amended by the addition of the words in italics: "The generally accepted principles of international law _the pronouncements of the League of Nations and the provisions of Treaties_ have binding force as German Constitutional Law." It has now been amended back by their omission. CHAPTER VII THE CONSTITUTION Looking at the new German Constitution, without troubling about its inner meanings, and comparing it with the Constitution of 1871, we are struck at once by the very considerable advance it represents in democratic development. One need not be a constitutional lawyer to assert with confidence that this is the most democratic Constitution possessed by any of the principal European peoples, and to add that it seems to have avoided many of the mistakes that have been marked in other Republican Constitutions, whether American, French, Portuguese or Russian. The President's powers, for example, and the relation of the Ministry to Parliament suggest that Dr. Preuss, the constitutional jurist responsible for its drafting and elaboration, had studied foreign constitutional history with a Prussian thoroughness and a Hebrew perspicacity. But a closer study of this Constitution will give us a different view of it. And this view will depend on whether we study it in the light of its development from the Revolution or of its difference from the _ancien régime_. If we compare it with the principles of the revolution we shall be tempted to condemn and reject it, like the German Revolution, as mere camouflaged reaction. It would certainly have been a very different document had it been produced in the first weeks of November. The Revolution, in so far as it had a constitutional conception at all, contemplated a "Räte system" (that is a Council Government), which should secure political power to the proletariat under a Central Committee, on the Russian model. If it had admitted Parliamentary institutions at all they would only have been subordinate to Council control. As to any survival of the old State sovereignties, they were looked on as having disappeared with the State dynasties from which they had originated. Thus the Erfurt proclamation of the Thuringian States on December 10th, 1918, proposed that the motley medley of those petty principalities be unified into one administrative department of a centralised Republic.