government exists the people can no more nominate at primaries than they can choose at elections. Such precisely has been the experience in Cook County, Illinois. There, from the time the primaries first went into effect, the leaders of the two principal vote-directing organizations have made slates more or less secretly, secured the most favorable position for the slate on the primary ballot, pushed the slate at the primaries, and obtained the nomination in practically every case of the slate candidates. In primary elections we have an appeal to voters on matters apparently less important and conspicuous than the filling of the offices themselves. If the vote-directing organization can in the long run control elections to a majority of the offices, it can certainly in the long run control the nominations for those offices at the primary election. We must not overlook one great advantage to the extra-legal government in making nominations at primaries instead of at conventions. In the convention the leaders of the extra-legal government were so openly and publicly the makers of nominations that they were in a degree responsible. They had to consider very carefully the popular temper in giving each candidate a place on the ballot. Under the primaries, however, the result is, in the language of the stump, “the judgment of the people.” If, therefore, any black sheep slip into nominations for obscure places it is the fault of the people, just as it used to be the fault of the people when bad men were elected to office. The popular demand, however, for primaries is a confession that elections did not produce the choice of the people. Before long, experience with universal and compulsory primaries to make nominations for long ballots will indicate that they do not produce nominations by the people. Not only is the compulsory primary for all elective offices entirely ineffective to break up the power of the extra-legal government to direct the nomination of its loyal adherents, but in the long run its presence exaggerates the very condition which necessarily causes the existence of a centralized extra-legal government controlling a decentralized legal government. That condition is the burden of political duties cast upon the voter which he will not and very likely cannot possibly carry. It is that which makes him politically ignorant and forces him to fall back upon the assistance of the professional political adviser. When the primaries double the burden on the voter they increase twofold the necessity for permanent organizations for directing and advising the politically ignorant voter how to vote. Consequently, so far from disrupting an extra-legal government, the universal and compulsory primary makes its continued existence even more certain. CHAPTER VIII THE INITIATIVE AND THE REFERENDUM