Under this system which still obtains in many states, scores of state, county and municipal offices are offered at every election to the choice of the mass of electors who on approaching the polls find themselves called on to select in addition to the members of the state legislature and Congress and state governors, a dozen or a score of administrative officials and judges. Sometimes they are invited to vote for an attorney-general, a state engineer and surveyor, a state treasurer, a state comptroller, half a dozen judges and justices, a district attorney, a sheriff, a mayor, a city treasurer, a couple of coroners, besides a governor, a state senator, and assemblymen and aldermen, say twenty in all. Sometimes as at an election in St. Louis, the list contains thirteen city officials to be elected, besides state officers and congressmen. In the cities of Ohio it sometimes includes an average of twenty-two officers at each yearly election. In a small town near New York there are about fifteen local offices to be filled at an election besides a dozen or two state and federal offices and so on throughout the Union. “Let the people rule,” say the politicians, because when the people attempt to rule by choosing administrative officials, it is really the politicians who make the choice. It is doubtful if there ever was a voter, even a professional politician, who was sufficiently well acquainted with each of the candidates on such a ticket and with his duties to enable him to decide intelligently upon his merits as compared with his rivals. Certainly not one in a hundred is competent to do so. Remember, too, that the voter has no real choice in the original selection of these candidates; that they are all chosen before the election by party managers in secret conclave, and forced through the primaries by the power of the machine; that if the voter rejects one rogue or incapable whom he happens to know or has heard of, he can do no more after all than to vote for the other party candidate who is quite likely to be likewise of the same evil stripe. The reader can see that manhood suffrage applied in this way is an infallible method of making easy and safe the selection of incompetent rascals for public office. For what the voter usually does in such case is to vote the whole party ticket, rogues, fools and all, realizing that if he fails to do so the rival set of scamps and incompetents will be the sole gainers.