The qualities required in a candidate for high judicial office are knowledge of the law, love of justice, high personal character, calmness, impartiality and independence. Mere popularity, or what so often is necessary to popularity, good-fellowship, is the last quality we look for in a judge. The self-seeker and self-advertiser is seldom qualified by temperament or character for judicial office. It requires the most thorough investigation as to the professional learning, career and conduct of a candidate and the most sifting exchange of views before a judicial candidate can be intelligently and wisely selected. For want of adequate means of acquiring information, the public in such large constituencies as the whole state of New York (in the case of judges of the Court of Appeals) and the various judicial districts (in the case of justices of the Supreme Court) cannot intelligently estimate the qualifications of judicial candidates. It seems to me nonsense to argue that in parties composed of hundreds of thousands of enrolled electors dispersed throughout the state, the voters can investigate, or exchange views, or intelligently act in regard to the qualifications of lawyers who are proposed as candidates for judicial office--almost as preposterous as if we were to select judicial candidates by lot from the names placed on the official primary list. The test of fitness for judicial office should indisputably be higher and more technical than for other offices. That test should require special capacity and character, to be ascertained by careful investigation, exchange of views, open discussion and comparison of merits by responsible delegates or representatives charged with that particular duty and acting in public and personally accountable for mistake, perversion, or corruption. This test can be best secured by the convention system; practically it cannot be secured at all by any system of secret direct primaries. Reform in the selection of judges, if their selection is to be by election, lies not in schemes to reform human nature by legislative nostrums and to destroy publicity and responsibility, but in making the voters appreciate that the government is theirs, that political power is theirs, that theirs is the duty to send competent representatives to conventions, that theirs is the responsibility of electing competent men, and that they are vitally interested in having a competent, impartial and independent judiciary. Political conventions will be reliable and responsive if the people will only see to it that competent, honest and patriotic men are elected to represent them. There is no other course unless we uproot our whole system of republican government.