“It is these methods, gradually perfected in campaign after campaign, that have won for Prohibition so many victories....”[44] The present writer has been told by eye-witnesses of the use of similar methods in imposing Prohibition upon the North-Western States. The second accident which played into the hands of the Prohibitionists was a new piece of political mechanism, the direct primary. The traditional American method of nominating candidates for office was the “convention.” Conventions might be self-appointed, called together by the force of some wave of enthusiasm. Normally they were routine assemblies representative of the established parties in the various political subdivisions of the country, states, counties, cities, &c. Such an assembly would be elected by the party voters, would formulate a “platform,” that is a declaration of party principles and purposes, and would also nominate candidates to stand for election on the platform. If a platform were adopted to which any delegate could not bring himself to support, it was his moral duty to “walk out” of the convention and separate from the party. Consequently it was the aim of the platform makers to set forth such principles as would retain in the party as many as possible of those who usually voted its ticket, and at the same time attract as many votes as possible from “independents” and voters enrolled in other parties. In such a system minorities of “cranks” were at a discount. The convention system was changed as one of the results of the change in the typical American mood away from boundless self-confidence to exaggerated self-criticism. Part of the new self-criticism was directed against the leadership of the various political parties. With the touching American faith in legal mechanism as a corrective of conditions unrelated either to legal theory or practice, it was proposed to make nominations dependent upon preliminary elections or “direct primaries” in which the enrolled voters of the given party might express themselves independently of the party “bosses” (at least so it was naively hoped by those who fostered the scheme).