To remove the occasion and the opportunities for the exercise of such pressure, which is likely to be often exerted in a covert way and to warp or pervert the legislator’s mind, is to diminish a temptation and to remove a stumbling block that lies in the path of civic duty. Whether a man be in theory a Protectionist or a Free Trader, whether or not he desires to nationalize public utilities, he must recognize the dangers incident to the passing of laws which influential groups of wealthy men may have a personal interest in promoting or resisting, because they offer a prospect of gain sufficiently large to make it worth while to “get at” legislatures and officials. Such dangers arise in all governments. That which makes them formidable in democracies is the fact that the interest of each individual citizen in protecting himself and the public against the selfish groups may be so small an interest that everybody neglects it, and the groups get their way. As we have been considering improvements in the machinery of government, this would be a fitting place for a discussion of what you call Primary Election Laws, which are intended both to reduce the power of party organizations and to stimulate the personal zeal of the voter by making it easier for him to influence the selection of a candidate. We have, however, in Europe, nothing corresponding to the Primary Laws of American States, nothing which recognizes a political party as a concrete body, nothing which deals with the mode of selecting candidates; and many of you doubtless know better than I do what has been the effect of these American enactments and whether they have really roused the ordinary citizen to bestir himself and to assert his independence of such party organizations as may have heretofore interfered with it. Europeans do not take kindly to the notion of giving statutory recognition to a Party, and they doubt whether the astuteness of those whom you call “machine politicians” may not succeed in getting hold of the new statutory Primaries as they did of the old ones. Be the merits of the new legislation what they may, one must hope that its existence will not induce the friends of reform to relax their efforts to reduce in other ways the power of political “Machines.”