oun and Benton, wiser than Lincoln and Sumner and
Stevens and Chase, wiser than Garfield and Elaine and McKinley and
Taft, knowing more in their day than all the people have learned in
all the days of the years since the Republic was founded.

And they tell us that representative government is a failure. They do
not put this declaration into so many words--part of them because they
do not know enough about the science of government to understand that
the doctrines they advocate are revolutionary, and the rest of them
because they lack the courage to openly declare that it is their
intention to change our form of government, to subvert the system upon
which our institutions are founded. But that is in effect what they
propose to do.

Every school boy knows that in a pure democracy the people themselves
perform directly all the functions of government, enacting laws
without the intervention of a legislature, and trying causes that
arise under those laws without the intervention of judge or jury;
while in a republic, on the other hand, the people govern themselves,
not by each citizen exercising directly all the functions of
government, but by delegating that power to certain ones among them
whom they choose to represent them in the legislatures, in the courts
of justice, and in the various executive offices.

It follows, therefore, that to substitute the methods of a democracy
for the methods of a republic touching any one of the three branches
of government is to that extent to declare that representative
government is a failure, is to that extent subversive and
revolutionary.

Now, it does not follow by any means that because a proposed change is
revolutionary it is therefore unwise. Taking it by and large, wherever
the word "revolution" has come into human history it has been only
another word for progress. Because a nation has pursued certain
methods for a long time it does not at all follow that those methods
are the best, although when a nation like the United States, so bold
and alert, so little hampered by tradition, so ready to try
experiments, has clung to the same methods of government for 130
years, a strong presumption has certainly been established that these
methods are the best, at least for that particular nation.

But is the new system wiser than the old--in the matter of making
laws, for example? The old system vests the law-making power in a
legislative body composed of men elected by the people