I want to ask whether, in your opinion, the ship of state—the government of the United States—is any less complicated, any less complex or any less likely to “sub” and stay “subbed,” exactly as each and every republic for twenty-five hundred years did “sub”—if placed in the hands of an inexperienced mass of experimenters in statecraft. Think this out for yourself. This is your government quite as much as mine, and it will be your government long after the conservative “Old Guard” have left the field of human activities. CHAPTER VI TREND OF THE TIMES A consideration of the constitutional guarantee that each state shall have a republican form of government, and the warning of Washington against making changes in the constitution. Both the trend of thought and the current of events are away from representative government and toward direct government. Legislating by initiative or by referendum, the recall of judges, and especially the recall of judicial decisions, come dangerously near constituting a democratic form of government, against which the Constitution of the United States guarantees. Its language you remember: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” Chief Justice Taney, interpreting this section, said: “It rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a state, for, as the United States guarantees to each state a republican form of government, Congress must necessarily decide what government is established in the state before it can determine whether it is republican or not.”[1] ----- Footnote 1: Luther vs. Borden, 7 Howard 1. Chief Justice Waite used the following language, the vital sentence of which I have italicized: “All the states had governments when the Constitution was adopted. In all, the people participated, to some extent, _through their representatives selected in the manner specially provided_. These governments the Constitution did not change. They were accepted precisely as they were and it is therefore to be presumed that they were such as it is the duty of the states to provide. Thus, we have unmistakable evidence of what was republican in form within the meaning of that term as employed in the Constitution.”[2] ----- Footnote 2: Minar vs. Happersatt, 21 Wall 112. It is well to note that this participation in their government, which the learned Chief Justice mentions, was “_through their representatives_,” and in no other way.