idealistic, so appreciative, so tolerant of mere mistakes, so easy to govern justly as the American people; but the best of them are determined that their republican government shall be the ultimate success their fathers promised to make it. They care much less about “world democracy”; they are far from being such consummate fools as to believe that our political system is fit for other and inferior races or to want to meddle with the affairs of other nations; but they want Americanism to continue _here_; they want honest and efficient government established in this country; and they fear the breakdown of those republican institutions to which they feel a passionate devotion. There have indeed been no lack of efforts at reform. All sorts of expedients have been proposed and every remedy possible has been adopted and tried except the only one which could possibly be efficacious, namely, the limitation and elevation of the electorate. This and the other new idea or so-called political reform has been tried and discarded, or proved of little value; hundreds of penal statutes have been enacted, hundreds of boards, commissions and officials of various sorts have been created; there have been innumerable grand jury inquests and committees of investigations; there have been created new ballot systems, new primary laws; initiatives and referendums, besides thousands of tax-payers’ suits, injunctions, newspaper campaigns, new reform parties and fusions of old parties, not with the slightest hope of reaching perfection, but in desperate efforts on behalf of common decency. All have failed. Countless political movements have been started and political campaigns fought in the effort to cure the delinquency, to cleanse the corruption of our local and general governments, with varying temporary success, but without permanent benefit. Men have spent their lives and fortunes in the effort; each new generation hopefully undertaking the task of cleaning the stable only to abandon it in its turn; and nothing permanent or even enduring has been accomplished. Here and there, an individual or a group of political malefactors has been punished; here and there schemes for public plunder have been exposed and defeated; the particular system or legislation which permitted these specific instances has been changed or reformed; this or that particular abuse suppressed, and in the aggregate a great deal of mischief has thus been done away with or prevented. But no one pretends that the root of the evil has been removed or that the grasp of the professional politician class upon the throat of the nation has been loosened. The elections from which so much was expected, the men and movements from which so much was hoped, have come and gone without substantial results. The same class of politicians, the same methods, the same political games, the same corruption, the same boss rule, the same old rings, the same fraud, cheating, waste and general inefficiency