640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and serious troubles of any kind should at the same time arise ; it 

 would be very far from impossible, if, in addition to the foreign ele- 

 ment, female suffrage should be introduced. Nothing is really needed, 

 at least in ordinary times, but a titular President of the Executive 

 Council to represent the commonwealth on occasions of state. In the 

 civil war Lincoln was, perhaps, useful as a chief, holding by tacit con- 

 sent a sort of dictatorship during the season of peril ; but institutions 

 are not made for civil war, and a provision might easily be framed en- 

 abling the Legislature in case of great public peril to confer on the 

 executive council increased authority for a limited time, somewhat 

 after the fashion of the Roman dictatorship, which worked well 

 enough during the healthy period of the republic. 



Now comes a momentous question. Ought the election to the cen- 

 tral Legislature by the people to be direct or indirect ; in other words, 

 ought the members of the central Legislature to be elected by the con- 

 stituencies at large, as they are now in England and other countries 

 under parliamentary government, or by the members of local assem- 

 blies elected in their turn by the people ? The writer of this paper is 

 a hearty democrat, and profoundly convinced that the people, with all 

 their passions and defects, will on the whole vote right whenever they 

 see their way. He is persuaded that the great obstacle to voting 

 right, as well as to doing other things that are right, is selfishness, and 

 that this prevails fully as much among the rich as among the poor ; 

 indeed, among the rich it is almost erected into a principle, under the 

 pretext of defending the rights of property, as though the rights of 

 the destitute did not require much more to be defended. He is not 

 actuated, therefore, by any conservative prejudice in saying that to 

 him the system of having a central Legislature elected directly by the 

 constituencies at large seems to have decisively failed. There are two 

 points in the process of election, the nomination and the voting. The 

 second point only has engaged the serious attention of statesmen, 

 whose minds have been occupied entirely with problems as to the 

 qualifications for the franchise, the distribution of seats, and the ques- 

 tion of the ballot. It is in the first part of the process that direct elec- 

 tion has broken down. The people, if left to themselves, will choose 

 rightly between two candidates ; but who is to choose the candidates? 

 The people at large can not select from any extensive area ; a common 

 man does not see over a hill, much less can he perform the task which 

 Mr. Hare's plan would set him, of picking out the persons of greatest 

 eminence from the whole nation a process which would infallibly 

 degenerate into a vast party ticket. On the other hand, the worthiest 

 are not very likely to nominate themselves, though the least worthy 

 are. The practical result is that the nominations are everywhere 

 usurped by party organizations and their proprietors, by caucuses 

 and wire-pullers, whose fell ascendency, complete in the United 

 States and Canada, is being very rapidly extended in this country. 



