German Liberalism and its institution parliamentary party government failed in the first place because they could not come to power before their day was already past. In the second place they failed because when their ideals did get realised they did so without opposition and consequently on too theoretic lines. The German system of proportional representation for example is the most accurately and equitably representative of all electoral systems. But it did not provide the one thing Germany wanted, a powerful and popular Government, and it did a fatal injury to Germany by helping to split the Socialist party. Thirdly German Liberals failed because their leaders were men grown middle-aged and muddle-headed in hopeless opposition. They had consequently neither the energy nor the experience for popular leadership. And fourthly they failed because the peculiar combination of nationalism and internationalism that constitutes Liberalism was deprived of all prestige with the German people by the policy followed at Paris. This policy made it almost impossible for a German to hold any middle position between extreme nationalism and extreme internationalism. Weimar lost its best chance of acceptance when the German parliamentary State was excluded from the League of Nations. And yet Weimar and German Liberalism had everything in its favour in the autumn of 1918. The reactionary factors that had so little difficulty in stultifying the Liberalism of Bethmann-Hollweg, von Kühlmann, and their predecessors were cancelled for the time being. Parliamentary government on the party system, the form of government developed by Liberalism on the English model, never having had a trial in Germany was accepted by nearly all political minds as the panacea. The minority of extremists who already advocated Council Government on the Russian model as the only political system that could realise the revolution had not as yet converted any large body of workmen. The Trades Unions held the workmen to the parliamentary system, and only some of the soldiers and most of the sailors were really revolutionary. The idea that the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils could be anything more than a mere improvisation for destruction and could have any constructive, still more constitutional, function never entered the heads of any political thinker. Even Liebknecht joined the Coalition Provisional Government and only withdrew on second thoughts that were probably those of the much more far-sighted Rosa Luxemburg. The surrender of their authority by the Peoples' Commissaries to the Constituent Assembly in December was received without criticism, and the subsequent similar surrender by the Central Council passed almost without comment. Germany was to have the most liberal of constitutions and that was to be enough for the realisation of the German revolution and for the reconciliation of the enemies of Germany. It was only as the weeks and months passed and it became evident that German