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The mask must be removed sooner or later and it cannot be too soon.

If a party must refer back to past years for respectability and honest officials it has surely become "a degenerate son of a noble sire." The republic can only exist-so long as its men are pure and honest, its laws spring from legitimate sources, and its laws are free from class legislation. If we have passed to the age when the sovereign voice of the people has become dangerous, when the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves, the republic is at its end and exists only in name. We are not a republic when certain arrogant persons assume and exercise the right to prevent the popular will from dominating the public policy.

Is the consent of the governed essential to the enactment of laws that govern them?

If we are a republic, if this is a free people let us retrace our steps to the first principles, the great idea of the Declaration of Independence. There can be no middle ground-no mongrel government.

Cloak in language, hide in pretences however plausible the condition of a government, Mexicanized, where the will of the people is not the sovereign law, still you are entrenching behind the mask of a republican form some other government of which its authors are afraid or ashamed.

If we are a republic let us have every law fresh and direct from the fountain of Liberty, the sovereign, untrammeled will of a free people.

Laws should be enacted with a single intention of carrying out the fundamental principles upon which this country rests. The greatest good for the greatest number should be the aim of the law makers. I do not believe the people are prepared to surrender the ancient fabric of our constitution for party success or private gain. A nation will survive pestilence and famine, it will recover from the devastation of war. It may overcome the evils of insurrection, but once the

M. J. DAUGHERTY.

palsying hand of corruption obtains a grasp on the vital functions of the Country there is not life enough to survive.

When the will of the people does not rule, the republic is suspended. When we substitute any other power for that of the sovereign will, the nation or State is not a democracy. I do not want to be understood as saying that a convention is per se undemocratic. I am not contending that a direct primary is essential to preserve our free institutions. I do say the caucus and convention, that in former times were conducted so as to express the will of the highest number of the party's choice, is a thing of the past. They have become the property of the ward-heeler and boss rule. They are mere plague spots on the body politic, the breeding centers of of ficial corruption.

The people can effect their party nominations by a direct vote. They do not need conventions. Why go to the trouble, expense and uncertainty of a convention, conducted under laws an Attorney General cannot construe, when a direct primary governed by simple laws, easily understood, can more surely and safely carry out the popular will? I can see no reason for it. If we need laws to govern the selection of candidates, the necessity arises from the abuses brought about by corrupt politicians. If we must have such laws let them be constructed on rational principles. The law that is made to prevent political sand-bagging, should not be left to be executed by the sand-bagger.

The people should select the candidates and be protected in so doing; they also should control the machinery that produces the candidates. It is wrong, it is revolutionary to permit any other power than that of the people to rule this great State.

The committees, clothed with extraordinary powers, have been removed from the control of the people and therein lies a menace to a pure election. This is wrong. It is usurpation. If the law that places the power to arbitrarily district

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counties, at the will of boss rule, is not repealed or declared unconstitutional, we are left at the mercy of the very power we sought to eliminate from politics. So long as the people can make their choice of candidates without molestation or interference, we need no primary law.

It is only to eradicate corrupt influences that have crept in, that the enactment of laws is demanded. The demand has been imperative. There can be no reason why the most efficacious laws to meet that end should not be enacted.

Therefore as an association pledged to the advancement of law and order it devolves upon the State Bar Association to insist on the enactment and enforcement of laws that will insure to the people a protection of their rights.

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