ect primaries in the selection of
judges. There is a ticket at the primaries on which something like
twenty or thirty lawyers run for the Supreme Bench. Some of them go
around and tell the electors how they will decide on questions after
they get in. The qualifications of most of them as lawyers and as men
are not known to the people. Some of them are prominent because they
have been in the headlines of newspapers as figuring in sensational
cases. Others have political prominence but no public experience to test
their judicial capacity. Do you think this method of selection by the
people would lead to the choice of a learned, skilled lawyer with that
experience, courage and fine judicial quality that are to make him a
great judge? Of course it would not. It has been my duty to select more
judges in a term of four years than any other President, and I have had
to look into and compare the results of selection of judicial
candidates by popular general primary and by convention, so that I know
what I am talking about when I say that the primary system has greatly
injured the average capacity of our elective judiciary.

Why should we not use common sense in matters of government just as we
use common sense in our own business? Why should we be afraid to tell
the people that they are not fitted to select high judicial officers?
They are not. You know you are not. You could not tell me who would be
good judges for Connecticut, or for any state in the Union where you
happen to live unless you went about and investigated the matter. If you
are put in a position of responsibility, you have sense enough to know
where to find out the facts and then to make the selection, but the
people lack that opportunity. So how is the question to be solved? By
electing a Chief Executive and charging him with the responsibility of
selecting competent men to act as judges. That is what is meant by the
short ballot.

Reformers-for-politics-only include as many vote-getting planks in a
platform as they can get in it without regard to their consistency or
inconsistency. They sometimes combine the short ballot with the
initiative, referendum and recall though they are utterly at variance.
The referendum is the submission of every issue to the people.

The short ballot, on the contrary, means putting up one or two men whose
names shall not encumber the ballot. Have you ever seen these ballots?
They are a yard long and a yard wide. They have a hundr