The American Consular Service

1907 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-913
Author(s):  
Wilbur J. Carr

The consular service of the United States has been for a long time the object of a great deal of criticism, some of which unfortunately has been well founded but much has been due to imperfect acquaintance with the legitimate functions of consuls and, therefore, to lack of ability to judge accurately of their shortcomings. It is of interest to note that of recent years the criticism has been for the most part confined to our own country, while from the people of other nations our consuls have received unstinted praise for their activity and efficiency, and our system has been frequently held up abroad as a model after which to reorganize some of the older European systems the virtues of which it has been the custom of our people to extol. But while it is true that in many respects our consuls have shown themselves the equals if not the superiors of the consuls of other nations, the fact remains that our service has been uneven in point of efficiency; there has been no satisfactory organization; little care has been exercised in the selection of persons for appointment; and the salaries and equipment have been far from adequate. Repeated attempts to correct these defects have been made during a period dating almost from the beginning of the government, but, with the exception of the improvements made in 1856, all these attempts have failed largely because they lacked the support of any considerable public sentiment.

1917 ◽  
Vol 85 (17) ◽  
pp. 455-456

The following is the text of the resolutions which officially entered the United States into the world war:— “Whereas the imperial German government has committed repeated acts of war against the government and the people of the United States of America; therefore be it “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in congress assembled, that the state of war between the United States and the imperial German government, which has thus been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared; and that the President be and he is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the government to carry on war against the imperial German government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.”


Author(s):  
Peter Temin

This chapter describes three concepts of government. Democracy is the government of, for and by the people. It provides services to all its members and insures them against a variety of risks, ranging from bankruptcy to the accident of being born poor and with a dark skin. Autarchy is government by a person or family that takes care of itself with little or no concern for the rest of the population. Oligarchy stands in between these extremes and varies by the size of the oligarchy. The United States in the 19th century was the uneasy combination of a demographic North and an oligarchic South. The country approached democracy in the 20th century, but this trajectory reversed after 1970, leading to an oligarchic dual economy.


1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Sharpe

In his celebrated study of American democracy written in 1888, Lord Bryce reserved his most condemnatory reflections for city government and in a muchquoted passage asserted: ‘There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States. The deficiencies of the National government tell but little for evil on the welfare of the people. The faults of the State governments are insignificant compared with the extravagance, corruption and mismanagement which mark the administration of most of the great cities'sangeetha.


1978 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Donald Zalewski

Professional journals and commercial publications have helped to acquaint the people of the United States with the metric system. In their enthusiastic support, however, they have bombarded teachers with numerous lists of metric objectives for the curriculum and countless activities that might be used to achieve those objectives. A group of teachers attending a workshop on measurement and metrics decided that a set of simple directives might help teachers to make a wise selection of objectives and methods for teaching the metric system. The teachers suggested the following list of dos and don'ts.


1906 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Maurice Low

A century of constitutional government in the United States has served to emphasize the wisdom of Hamilton's warning of “the tendency of the legislative authority to absorb every other.” He clearly foresaw and attempted to guard against, dangers that today are only too apparent. “In governments purely republican,” he wrote, “this tendency is almost irresistible. The representatives of the people, in a popular assembly, seem sometimes to fancy that they are the people themselves, and betray strong symptoms of impatience and disgust at the least sign of opposition from any other quarter; as if the exercise of its rights, by either the executive or the judiciary, were a breach of their privilege and an outrage to their dignity. They often appear disposed to exert an imperious control over the other departments; and, as they commonly have the people on their side, they always act with such momentum as to make it very difficult for the other members of the government to maintain the balance of the Constitution.”Never did human ingenuity devise a more nicely balanced system of government than when the framers of the Constitution allocated to the executive and to the legislature the exercise of powers not to be infringed by the other; but like many things human the intent has been perverted. Every person familiar with the Constitution, the debates in the convention, and the writings of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in The Federalist, must know that the purpose of the framers of the Constitution was to create a system of government by which the President should become neither the creature nor the controller of the legislature; and by vesting certain exclusive powers in the popular branch and certain other powers in the Senate to provide that the line of demarcation between the two houses should not be overstepped.


1917 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 757-762

The mission for which I have the honor to speak is charged by the Government and the people of the United States of America with a message to the Government and the people of Russia.The mission comes from a democratic republic. Its members are commissioned and instructed by a President who holds his high office as Chief Executive of more than one hundred million free people, by virtue of a popular election in which more than eighteen million votes were freely cast and fairly counted, pursuant to law, by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage.


Author(s):  
William E. Rapp

Despite the high regard for the US military by the American public, a number of tensions continue to grow in civil-military relations in the United States. These are exacerbated by a lack of clarity, and thus productive debate, in the various relationships inherent in civil and military interaction. By trisecting civil military relations into the relations between the people and the military, the military and the government, and the people and the government on military issues, this chapter examines the potential for crisis in coming years. Doing so allows for greater theoretical and popular understanding and thus action in addressing the tensions, for there is cause for concern and action in each of the legs of this interconnected triangle.


2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yves Tiberghien

This article reexamines the period of the Japanese bubble (1985–1990) and emphasizes ill-supervised and ill-sequenced financial deregulation as a key proximate factor. Given the subsequent costs of this political choice, what explains such a path of domestic financial deregulation without the establishment of corresponding supervisory institutions? I argue that the suboptimal Japanese outcome represents the equilibrium point for political leaders who had to balance global pressures to deregulate the economy, corporate pressures to liberalize finance, and domestic resistance by an array of politically connected interest groups. The government chose ill-supervised financial deregulation as the path of least political resistance and the golden bullet that could both defuse trade tensions with the United States and readjust the Japanese political economy in a harmless way. Instead, as they interacted with other factors, the choices made in the early 1980s destabilized the Japanese system and carried the seeds of the ensuing financial crisis.


Subject Iranian networks in Syria. Significance Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani played a key role in shaping the array of foreign and local Shia militias that supported the government of President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war from 2011. This was a complex operation involving the mobilisation of sympathetic clerics across the Shia world, who sponsored and recruited the various militias, as well as the selection of capable military leaders. Impacts The Quds Force will seek multiple means of retaliating against the United States through covert operations and proxies. Iran will take a pragmatic approach to preserving key alliances, including with Russia and Syria. The IRGC might accelerate the redeployment of some militias from Syria to Yemen, Iraq or other more promising theatres. IRGC leaders will become more cautious in their travel plans, reducing their scope to deploy personal charisma in co-opting foreign Shia.


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