The makers of our mid-nineteenth-century state and municipal governments undertook to free this land from unpopular government. If all governments must be tyrannical from the point of view of some, they preferred the tyranny of the majority to the tyranny of the minority. Their aim was to establish and maintain a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as distinguished from a government of the few, by the few, and for the few, at the expense of the many and against their wish. They could not, however, change human characteristics. The tendency, therefore, to use power selfishly continued. They did endeavor to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of the few by splitting the power of government up among many separate and distinct offices and limiting the power which any one officeholder might exercise. They sought to make impossible the retention of power in the face of popular disapproval by requiring all offices of importance in the government to be filled by popular election and the elections to be held frequently. For the greater part of a century these ways and means of heading off unpopular government have been constantly employed in the development of our state and municipal governments. The belief of the people in popular government has become a belief in these two means of obtaining it. In popular estimation the means have become the end. Inevitably these expedients for securing immunity from unpopular government have been pressed to great extremes.