be legally
exposed by a bathing suit, or the pensioning of a Swedish Assistant
Janitor,--all of which are the substance of actual bills introduced in
various State legislatures during the session last closed.

Another grave weakness in our system is the election by popular vote of
many judicial and administrative officers, coupled with the vigorous
remnants of the old and degrading "spoils system" whereby many thousands
of strictly non-political offices are almost automatically vacated after
any partisan victory. I cannot trust myself to speak of the infamy of an
elective judiciary; fortunately I live in a state where this worst abuse
of democratic practice does not exist, and so it touches me only in so
far as it offends the sense of decency and justice. In the other cases
it is only a question of efficient and intelligent administration. There
is an argument for electing the chief executive of a city, a state or
the nation, by popular vote, and the same holds in the case of the lower
house of the legislature where a bi-cameral system exists, but there is
no argument for the popular election of the administrative officers of a
state. There is even less,--if there can be less than nothing--for the
changes in personnel that take place after every election. Civil service
reform has done a world of good, but as yet it has not gone far enough
in some directions, while its mechanism of examinations is defective in
principle in that it leaves out the personal equation and establishes
its tests only along a very few of the many lines that actually exist. I
would offer it as a proposition that no election should in itself affect
the status of any man except the man elected, and, in the case of a
mayor or governor or the President, those who are directly responsible
to him and to his administration for carrying out his policies; and
further, that the voter, when he votes, should vote once and for one man
in his city, once and for one man in his state, and once and for one man
in the nation, and that man, in each case, should be his representative
in the lower branch of the legislative body. Choosing administrative
officials by majority vote, and the election of judges for short terms
by the same method, are absurdities of a system fast falling into chaos.
The maintenance of a bi-cameral legislative organization, with the
choosing of the members of both houses by the same electorate is in the
same class, a perfectly irrational ano