obvious master,
whereas the hands of the boss are always where you least expect them to
be.

When I was in Oregon, not many months ago, I had some very interesting
conversations with Mr. U'Ren, who is the father of what is called the
Oregon System, a system by which he has put bosses out of business. He is
a member of a group of public-spirited men who, whenever they cannot get
what they want through the legislature, draw up a bill and submit it to
the people, by means of the initiative, and generally get what they want.
The day I arrived in Portland, a morning paper happened to say, very
ironically, that there were two legislatures in Oregon, one at Salem, the
state capital, and the other going around under the hat of Mr. U'Ren. I
could not resist the temptation of saying, when I spoke that evening,
that, while I was the last man to suggest that power should be
concentrated in any single individual or group of individuals, I would,
nevertheless, after my experience in New Jersey, rather have a legislature
that went around under the hat of somebody in particular whom I knew I
could find than a legislature that went around under God knows who's hat;
because then you could at least put your finger on your governing force;
you would know where to find it.

Why do we continue to permit these things? Isn't it about time that we
grew up and took charge of our own affairs? I am tired of being under age
in politics. I don't want to be associated with anybody except those who
are politically over twenty-one. I don't wish to sit down and let any man
take care of me without my having at least a voice in it; and if he
doesn't listen to my advice, I am going to make it as unpleasant for him
as I can. Not because my advice is necessarily good, but because no
government is good in which every man doesn't insist upon his advice being
heard, at least, whether it is heeded or not.

Some persons have said that representative government has proved too
indirect and clumsy an instrument, and has broken down as a means of
popular control. Others, looking a little deeper, have said that it was
not representative government that had broken down, but the effort to get
it. They have pointed out that, with our present methods of machine
nomination and our present methods of election, which give us nothing more
than a choice between one set of machine nominees and another, we do not
get representative government at all,--at least not government