gress has adopted laws that have taken hold of the
corporations, and Congress is the most perfect model of representative
government. Why did Congress act? Because the people were aroused. You
must have the people aroused in order to make any system effective, and
when this is the case under the representative system, there is no
difficulty about its working.

The general primary is, of course, a good thing for certain leading
offices, but if you resort to it for selecting judges or subordinate
officials whose qualifications the public cannot be supposed to know,
the result will be anything but good. Men will be put into office by
some fortuitous circumstance, such as a particular advertisement in the
newspapers. Thus your Senator, and your governor, might well be elected
by the general primary as the result of party selection, but if the
people selected judges and subordinate officers they would have to take
men without regard to their qualifications. The short ballot means, as I
said, that the people should select leading officers who should in turn
select the subordinate officers and appoint the judges.

To the objection that voters will not vote on referendums, it is urged
that they ought to be compelled to do so. This is a futile remedy. Burke
said you cannot bring an indictment against the people, and it is
equally true that you cannot indict a great majority of the electorate
for not complying with their electoral duties. Suppose you attempt to
forfeit their right to vote, you may injure them, but you injure the
whole people a great deal more. The 80 per cent of the population whose
welfare is directly affected by the action of the electorate, but who
are not by law permitted to vote, are entitled to have the more
intelligent voters retained in the electorate. For, I am sorry to say,
it is generally among the intelligent part of the community that we find
neglect of electoral duties. The wisest course, therefore, is to give to
the people as much electoral duty as they are ordinarily able and
willing to perform, and no more. The fundamental fallacies in the
initiative, referendum and recall are, first, that they impose on the
voters three times the electoral work they had to do under the
representative system, and second, that the additional work involved is
of a kind that could be done much better through agents than by the
people directly. As to the recall of officers, I have only to say that
if you elect a man