Among people generally there is a failure to agree upon any specific cause for the sad inferiority of our political condition. Some attribute it to human frailty; some to American carelessness or good nature; some to the spirit of the age, some to the inherent weakness of democracy. In a very able and scholarly little book published as late as 1918 by Max Farrand of Yale University entitled _The Development of the United States_, the writer, after referring to persistent and ineffectual attempts of reformers for the past generation to cleanse politics in this country, makes this significant statement (p. 293): “It is surprising that the people still retain faith in any remedies, but hope springs eternal and every new plan was able to rally ardent supporters. To the thoughtful observer, however, it was evident that the root of the trouble had not been found and that something more radical or something entirely different was necessary.” I find no hint in Farrand’s book as to what this “something” might be. One may suspect that the worthy professor had tracked the bear to his den but did not care to start him; that he preferred to avoid making his book the subject of controversy by giving his opinion as to what is in fact “the root of the trouble.” However, he states the problem in a nutshell. All efforts to reform and cleanse our politics have failed, something new and different is needed, some remedy that will reach the very source of the political corruption of our time and country. But after all, there need be very little difficulty in finding the “root of the trouble”; it lies exposed, plain enough for all men to see and to stumble over as they pass to and fro. Many no doubt have identified it who prefer to be silent on the subject, though a few prominent men have spoken out. President Woolsey of Yale, for example, frankly says that “universal suffrage does not secure the government of the wisest nor even secures the liberties of a country placed in such a democratic situation, much less secures its order and stability.” (_Pol. Science._ Vol. I, Sec. 101). In Reemelin’s _American Politics_ (1881) the author says in his chapter on the ballot box that “thickly strewn around us lie the evidences, that governing by the ballot box, based on universal suffrage and universal qualification for office is a failure; but why this is so, and what remedy we should apply is not so intelligible.” (P. 168.) In 1871 the _Westminster Review_, a British radical magazine, published an article on _The American Republic, its Strength and Weakness_ in which the dangers of manhood suffrage were plainly pointed out, and its institution attributed to the efforts of demagogues, and to a mistaken conception of suffrage as a right instead of as a privilege to be conferred upon those capable of exercising it. The writer sums up the topic by saying that: