Methods of Reform. 
275 
It has proved a false guide and model to ill-informed reform¬ 
ers in our own and other states, and laws drafted on its lines 
have been used by sham reformers as stalking horses from 
which to kill off more thorough measures which they dread. 
Chapter 416, Acts of 1892 of Massachusetts, rather passes the 
others in efficiency and completeness. It was drawn by ex¬ 
perienced and earnest reformers after a careful study of the 
English act. 
It forbids a candidate to pay money to promote his own nom¬ 
ination or election exept his own personal expenses and volun¬ 
tary subscriptions to a political committee. It makes every 
combination of three or more persons to promote or defeat any 
candidate’s election a political committee and compels it to 
choose a treasurer who must receive and disburse all its funds 
and report them if they exceed $25, and any individual receiving 
or disbursing money for election purposes to the amount of $20 
must also report. 
This brings us to the enactments of the past two years. To 
ascertain these late laws after the close of the sessions for 1893, 
letters of inquiry were addressed to the secretaries of state of 
our fifty states and territories (omitting the District of Columbia) 
enclosing stamps for replies. Including my own state, obliging 
replies were received from forty-five states and territories. 
Letters were again addressed to those secretaries who did not 
answer the first letter, but proved wholly insufficient to merit 
the kindness of a response from Florida, Mississippi, Texas, 
New Jersey and Oklahoma. In Alaska there are no election 
frauds or laws to prevent them simply because there are no 
elections. 
From the answers received, it appears that forty-one states 
and territories had not revised their law in this respect during 
that year, except at least in minor details; that a bill on the 
model of the inefficient New York statute was passed by the sen¬ 
ate but killed in the assembly of Minnesota, and a like bill was 
passed by the senate and in like manner defeated by the as¬ 
sembly in Wisconsin, and that in the latter state another bill 
shaped on the Massachusetts act was introduced in the senate but 
received no support in either house, being opposed as “bother- 
