ectually secured against the danger of mal-administration;
and that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to
these purposes, a majority of the community bath an indubitable,
inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it,
in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

I have heard that read a score of times on the Fourth of July, but I never
heard it read where actual measures were being debated. No man who
understands the principles upon which this Republic was founded has the
slightest dread of the gentle,--though very effective,--measures by which
the people are again resuming control of their own affairs.

* * * * *

Nor need any lover of liberty be anxious concerning the outcome of the
struggle upon which we are now embarked. The victory is certain, and the
battle is not going to be an especially sanguinary one. It is hardly going
to be worth the name of a battle. Let me tell the story of the
emancipation of one State,--New Jersey:

It has surprised the people of the United States to find New Jersey at the
front in enterprises of reform. I, who have lived in New Jersey the
greater part of my mature life, know that there is no state in the Union
which, so far as the hearts and intelligence of its people are concerned,
has more earnestly desired reform than has New Jersey. There are men who
have been prominent in the affairs of the State who again and again
advocated with all the earnestness that was in them the things that we
have at last been able to do. There are men in New Jersey who have spent
some of the best energies of their lives in trying to win elections in
order to get the support of the citizens of New Jersey for programs of
reform.

The people had voted for such things very often before the autumn of 1910,
but the interesting thing is that nothing had happened. They were
demanding the benefit of remedial measures such as had been passed in
every progressive state of the Union, measures which had proved not only
that they did not upset the life of the communities to which they were
applied but that they quickened every force and bettered every condition
in those communities. But the people of New Jersey could not get them, and
there had come upon them a certain pessimistic despair. I used to meet men
who shrugged their shoulders and said: "What difference does it make how
we vote? Nothing e