wer, relieved of responsibility, discredited, and treated as unworthy
of confidence. The unfortunate effect of such treatment upon the character
of legislatures and the kind of men who will he willing to serve in them
can well be imagined. It is the influence of such treatment that threatens
representative institutions in our country. Granting that there have been
evils in our legislative system which ought to be cured, I cannot think
that this is the right way to cure them. It would seem that the true way
is for the people of the country to address themselves to the better
performance of their own duty in selecting their legislative
representatives and in holding those representatives to strict
responsibility for their action. The system of direct nominations, which
is easy of application in the simple proceeding of selecting members of a
legislature, and the Short Ballot reform aim at accomplishing that result.
I think that along these lines the true remedy is to be found. No system of
self-government will continue successful unless the voters have sufficient
public spirit to perform their own duty at the polls, and the attempt to
reform government by escaping from the duty of selecting honest and capable
representatives, under the idea that the same voters who fail to perform
that duty will faithfully perform the far more onerous and difficult duty
of legislation, seems an exhibition of weakness rather than of progress.

II

ESSENTIALS

In the first of these lectures I specified certain essential
characteristics of our system of government, and discussed the preservation
of the first--its representative character. The four other characteristics
specified have one feature in common. They all aim to preserve rights by
limiting power.

Of these the most fundamental is the preservation in our Constitution of
the Anglo-Saxon idea of individual liberty. The republics of Greece and
Rome had no such conception. All political ideas necessarily concern man as
a social animal, as a member of society--a member of the state. The ancient
republics, however, put the state first and regarded the individual only as
a member of the state. They had in view the public rights of the state in
which all its members shared, and the rights of the members as parts of the
whole, but they did not think of individuals as having rights independent
of the state, or against the state. They never escaped from the attitude
towards public a