The Senate as a whole remained obdurate. When in the Fifty-third Congress the resolution of the House came before that body, Mr. Hoar, of Massachusetts, made, on April 6 and 7, 1893, one of his most eloquent and impassioned pleas for resisting this new proposal to the uttermost. He declared that it would transfer the seat of power to the "great cities and masses of population," that it would create new temptations to fraud and corrupt practices, that it implied that the Senate had been untrue to its trust, that it would lead to the election of the President and the judiciary by popular majorities, and that it would "result in the overthrow of the whole scheme of the Senate and in the end of the whole scheme of the national Constitution as designed and established by the framers of the Constitution and the people who adopted it." With impatience, he refused to listen to the general indictment which had been brought against the Senate as then constituted. "The greatest victories of constitutional liberty since the world began," he concluded, "are those whose battle ground has been the American Senate, and whose champions have been the Senators who for a hundred years, while they have resisted the popular passions of the House, have led, represented, guided, obeyed, and made effective the deliberate will of a free people." Having failed to make an impression on the Senate by a frontal attack, the advocates of popular election set to work to capture that citadel by a rear assault. They began to apply the principle of the direct primary in the nomination of candidates for the Senate, and this development at length culminated in the Oregon scheme for binding the legislature to accept the "people's choice." This movement gained rapid headway in the South, where the real contest was over nomination, not election, on account of the absence of party divisions. As early as 1875, the Nebraska constitution had provided for taking a popular preferential vote on candidates for the Senate; but no considerable interest seems to have been taken in it at the time. In 1899, Nevada passed a law entitled "an act to secure the election of United States Senators in accordance with the will of the people and the choice of the electors of the state." Shortly afterward, Oregon enacted her famous statute which attempted to compel the legislature to accept the popular nominee; and from that time forward the new system spread rapidly. By 1910, at least three fourths of the states nominated candidates for the Senate by some kind of a popular primary.