A protest had been made to the New York Assembly claiming that "the fundamental principles of representative government" would be violated in refusing to seat the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen. But it is plain that men controlled in office by such a secret device would not really represent their districts, nor those who voted for them, but only the members of the dues-paying locals or the executive committee holding their resignations; and in cases of some of the suspended Socialists it was said that of the votes they received not one in ten nor even one in twenty had been cast by a dues-paying Socialist. At the trial Morris Hillquit, of counsel for the defense, tried to break the force of this damaging evidence by getting in testimony "that this provision of the State Constitution has been a dead letter since its inception." (New York "Evening Sun," January 22, 1920.) But this hypocrisy was thoroughly exposed by the testimony given on January 28, 1920, by George R. Lunn, Democratic Mayor of Schenectady, who had been a candidate for that office three times as a Socialist. The following summary of his testimony is from the "New York Sun" of January 29, 1920: "The outstanding features of Mayor's Lunn's testimony were his statements that on the night before election in 1911, when he was running for Mayor on the Socialist ticket, two members of the party went to his home and presented a blank resignation for his signature. This, he said, he signed in order to 'avoid a squabble,' although he considered it 'child's play and illegal.' He refused, he said, in 1913 to sign the required resignation before the election. This time he was defeated. In 1915, he testified, he was again nominated and elected, after repudiating that part of the Socialist Constitution which bound him to follow the dictates of his party leaders. The result, he said, was that the State organization revoked the charter of the entire Schenectady local in order to discipline him." In a ninety-page brief, submitted to members of the New York Assembly on February 12, 1920, by counsel of the Judiciary Committee, after five weeks of investigating the qualifications of the suspended Socialist Assemblymen, Attorney-General Charles D. Newton and the other signers said that the five Socialists by "their promise ... to place their resignations in the hands of the dues-paying members ... abdicated their functions as Assemblymen and disqualified themselves from taking the oath of office and rendered their oath false." ("New York Times," February 13, 1920.) The same brief, according to the "Times" of above date, says: