The new verdict must also be signed by the foreman of the jury. When the jury has again returned to the court-room, the whole of the verdict - not merely the amended parts must be announced to the court, and the president, as well as the clerk of the court, must affix his signature, even though he may have signed the original verdict prior to the new deliberation of the jury. The defendant is now brought back into the court-room, and the verdict is made known to him by a reading of the answers to the questions, together with the declaration that they were made by the majority required by law. The reading is usually done by the clerk of the court. If the court is unanimously of the opinion that the jury has, on the whole, erred to the disadvantage of the defendant, then the court, by decree and without giving the grounds of its decision, refers the case for a new trial before the Schwurgericht at its next session. In this matter the court proceeds on its own motion. Such a reference of the case is permissible up to the very pronouncing of the judgment. If several independent criminal acts or several defendants are involved in the case, then only those acts and those persons that are affected, in the view of the court, by the error of the jury are drawn into the second trial. In the new trial no juror may take part who has coöperated in rendering the earlier verdict. A case once referred for a second trial before another session of the Schwurgericht may not be referred again. In the new trial judgment must be pronounced, even if the verdict is regarded as erroneous." BERLIN, June, 1904. BURT ESTES HOWARD. Goltdammers Archiv, vol. xliii, p. 381. Here it is held sufficient if, by means of the record of the trial, the first verdict and the variations of the second are distinguishable. 1 Unless the foreman has written in the new verdict over his former signature. See RGer. III, May 24, 1886; RGer. II, December 16, 1890; RGer. II, September 24, 1895; and RGer. III, January 12, 1885. RGer. IV, November 15, 1895, Juristische Wochenschrift, vol. xxiv, p. 592. the trial but not in the decision of the jury. This is the view of Löwe, note 8 to StPO, sec. 317. There seems to be no decision of the Reichsgericht touching this matter. MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION.1 HIS is a work of a kind that was abundant in England during the T1 eighteenth century but is now extinct there, while it flourishes in this country. Mental growths are no exception to the general laws of growth as regards distribution of species in time and space. Dying out in one region, a species may in another region find favoring conditions and perpetuate the type. In many respects the political ideas of our own times in this country reproduce species which belong to England's past. Mr. Steffens's work belongs to the same class as Burgh's Political Disquisitions published in 1774, Browne's Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times published in 1757, and innumerable tracts and essays now sunk into oblivion. Mr. Steffens says of the articles collected in his book: "They were written for a purpose, they were published serially with a purpose, and they are reprinted now together to further the same purpose, which was- and is to sound for the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship." Burgh said of his work that it was "calculated to draw the timely attention of government and people to a due consideration of the necessity and the means of reforming those errors, defects and abuses; of restoring the constitution and saving the state." Mr. Steffens puts the blame for misgovernment upon the apathy of American character. He says: We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some "party"; we let them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them bribe and wheedle our sovereignty from us. . . . We break our own laws and rob our own government, the lady at the custom house, the lyncher with his rope, and the captain of industry with his bribe and his rebate. The spirit of graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit. In the same style Browne argued that virtue was rotting out of the English stock from the development of a sordid commercialism which was corroding all the moral elements which are the true foundations 1 The Shame of the Cities. By Lincoln Steffens. New York, McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904. 306 pp. of national greatness. The thought flows in the same channels, the same ideals preside over opinion, and the resemblance extends even to details of suggestion. All we have to do [says Mr. Steffens] is to establish a steady demand for good government. The bosses have us split up into parties. . . . If we should leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city and state and the nation, we should rule parties and cities and states and nation. All this goes back to the time of Addison. In the Spectator, Number 125, Tuesday, July 24, 1711, he recommended that honest men should enter into an association for the support of one another against the endeavors of those whom they ought to look upon as their common enemies, whatsoever side they may belong to. Were there such an honest body of neutral forces, we should never see the worst of men in the great figures of life because they are useful to a party; nor the best unregarded because they are above practising those methods which would be grateful to their factions. We should then single every criminal out of the herd and hunt him down, however formidable and overgrown he might appear. One difference should be noted. It relates to temperament. American self-confidence and optimism make a distinctive mark lacking in the extinct English literature of this species. Mr. Steffens ends his sermon by saying: We Americans may have failed. We may be mercenary and selfish. Democracy with us may be impossible and corruption inevitable; but these articles, if they have proved nothing else, have demonstrated without doubt that we can stand the truth; that there is pride in the character of American citizenship; and that this pride may be a power in the land. This is a small set-off for such tremendous defects, but the tone of sentiment is hopeful and buoyant as compared with the gloomy forebodings which Burgh expressed in his closing reflections. He said: I see the once rich and populous cities of England in the same condition as those of Spain; whole streets lying in rubbish, and the grass peeping up between the stones in those which continue still inhabited. I see the harbors empty, the warehouses shut up, and the shopkeepers playing draughts, for want of customers. I see our noble and spacious turnpike roads covered with thistles and other weeds, and scarce to be traced out. I see the studious men reading the "State of Britain," the magazines, the "Political Disquisitions," and the histories of the eighteenth century, and execrating the stupidity of their fathers, who, in spite of many faithful warnings given them, sat still, and suffered their country to be ruined by a set of wretches whom they could have crushed. Such were the opinions of English reformers on the eve of the wonderful outburst of national energy which created the British empire and brought to England wealth and prosperity beyond the imagination of the wildest dreamer. And yet the forecast was not wholly mistaken, for corruption and mismanagement lost England the American colonies and brought her to deep abasement before the evil generated its cure and the constitution was brought into accord with the needs of the But historians of English political development point out that the transformation was accomplished by the politicians themselves, without the adoption of the nostrums prescribed by the reformers and by the very means which the reformers denounced as the essence of corruption. The reformers sought means of administration by the people; the politicians denied them that, but unwittingly provided means of control by the people through the formation of an agency of legislative direction and management possessing plenary authority and hence complete responsibility. This went to the root of the trouble; for in retrospect it is plain enough that the systematic political corruption was the result of political confusion. The doctrine of the separation of the powers of government had obstructed the development of any such agency or organ of sovereignty, clothed with power to provide a proper division of the functions of government and to correlate the exercise of those functions. The actual embodiment of sovereignty which gradually took shape came not by deliberate intention but through the constraint of hard necessity. The formation of the English parliamentary type of government may be described, in the terms of American politics, by saying that boss rule grew up inside the government until it acquired complete authority, thus bringing within reach of public opinion, through the suffrage, competent apparatus of control over the behavior of the government and creating conditions of political activity which gradually substituted the leader for the boss. The forces which sustained constitutional development did not proceed from reform agitation but from the phleg 1 Sir Leslie Stephen, in his Hobbes (The Macmillan Co., 1904), makes some acute remarks upon the unforeseen character of English constitutional development. See particularly pp. 180, 181, 199 and 200. matic common sense of the British people, more interested in results than solicitous about means and not prone to extravagant expectations from the every-day human nature which forms the stuff of politics. To take things as they are and make the best of them, to deal with situations as they arise by the means that are available, to endure what cannot be cured, to look upon the bright side and to cultivate a habit of cheerfulness- these are the traits of which sound politics are compounded and by which constitutional progress is sustained. National hypochondria is a worse evil than national corruption. Happily the American people are free from that at any rate; they are disgusted but not dismayed by the situation, and they have a deep conviction that they will eventually find ways and means of dealing with it. Meanwhile it must be admitted that Mr. Steffens' book does not exaggerate the facts of the case. What he says about the condition of affairs in our cities is true, and much more might be said to the same purport. In this book he confines himself to municipal graft. The graft system extends to state administration also. The "organization" judge who "takes orders" is another feature of the graft system, the more dangerous since its virus penetrates the very marrow of our institutions. The facts with which Mr. Steffens deals are superficial symptoms. Hardly any disguise of them is attempted in the ordinary talk of local politicians. One of the first things which practical experience teaches is that the political ideals which receive literary expression have a closely limited range. One soon reaches strata of population in which they disappear and the relation of boss and client appears to be proper and natural. The connection between grafting politicians and their adherents is such that ability to levy blackmail inspires the same sort of respect and admiration which Rob Roy's followers felt for him in the times that provided a career for his peculiar talents. And as in Rob Roy's day, intimate knowledge finds in the type some hardy virtues. For one thing, politicians of this type do not indulge in cant. They are no more shamefaced in talking about their grafting exploits to an appreciative audience than a medieval baron would have been in discussing the produce of his feudal fees and imposts. Mr. Steffens has really done no more than to put together material lying about loose upon the surface of municipal politics and give it effective presentation. The general truth of his statement of the case is indisputable. But the same might have been said of the exhibits of the eighteenth century English reformers; and yet the impression made by them of decay and disease in the body politic has since been shown |