ly purified and that
regard for the law would be stimulated. In one instance I am persuaded
that disfranchisement should be for life, and that is in the case of
giving or accepting a bribe or otherwise committing a crime against the
ballot; this, together with treason against the state, should be
sufficient cause for eliminating the offender from all further
participation in public affairs. If the electorate could be purified
after this fashion, and if more stringent laws could be passed in the
matter of naturalization of aliens, together with iron-clad requirements
that every voter should be able to speak, read and write the English
language, we should have achieved something towards the safeguarding of
the suffrage.

The third weakness in our system, and in some respect the most
dangerous, as it is in all respects the most pestiferous, is the
insanity of law-making. All parliamentary governments suffer from this
malady, but that of the United States most grievously, and this is true
of the national government, the states and the municipalities. It has
become the conviction of legislative bodies that they must justify their
existence by making laws, and the more laws they pass the better they
have discharged their duties. The thing has become a scandal and an
oppression, for the liberties of American citizens and the just
prerogatives of the states and the cities, as vital human groups, have
been more infringed upon, reduced, and degraded by free legislation than
ever happened in similar communities by the action of absolute monarchs.
It is a folly that works its insidious injury in two ways; first by
confusing life by innumerable laws ill-advised, ill-drawn, mutually
contradictory, ephemeral in their nature, inquisitorial in their
workings; second, by creating a condition where any personal or factious
interest can be served by due process of law, until at last we have
reached a point where liberty itself has largely ceased to exist and we
find ourselves crushed under a tyranny of popular government no less
oppressive than the tyranny of absolutism. Nor is this all; the mania
for making laws has bred a complete and ingenious and singularly
effective system of getting laws made by methods familiar to the members
of all legislative bodies whether they are city councils, state
legislatures or the national congress, and this means opportunities for
corruption, and methods of corruption, that are fast degrading
government