were formerly honored, are hampered, shorn of power, relieved of responsibility, discredited, and treated as unworthy of confidence.  The unfortunate effect of such treatment upon the character of legislatures and the kind of men who will he willing to serve in them can well be imagined.  It is the influence of such treatment that threatens representative institutions in our country.  Granting that there have been evils in our legislative system which ought to be cured, I cannot think that this is the right way to cure them.  It would seem that the true way is for the people of the country to address themselves to the better performance of their own duty in selecting their legislative representatives and in holding those representatives to strict responsibility for their action.  The system of direct nominations, which is easy of application in the simple proceeding of selecting members of a legislature, and the Short Ballot reform aim at accomplishing that result.  I think that along these lines the true remedy is to be found.  No system of self-government will continue successful unless the voters have sufficient public spirit to perform their own duty at the polls, and the attempt to reform government by escaping from the duty of selecting honest and capable representatives, under the idea that the same voters who fail to perform that duty will faithfully perform the far more onerous and difficult duty of legislation, seems an exhibition of weakness rather than of progress.

II

ESSENTIALS

In the first of these lectures I specified certain essential characteristics of our system of government, and discussed the preservation of the first—­its representative character.  The four other characteristics specified have one feature in common.  They all aim to preserve rights by limiting power.

Of these the most fundamental is the preservation in our Constitution of the Anglo-Saxon idea of individual liberty.  The republics of Greece and Rome had no such conception.  All political ideas necessarily concern man as a social animal, as a member of society—­a member of the state.  The ancient republics, however, put the state first and regarded the individual only as a member of the state.  They had in view the public rights of the state in which all its members shared, and the rights of the members as parts of the whole, but they did not think of individuals as having rights independent of the state, or against the state.  They never escaped from the attitude towards public and individual civil rights, which was dictated by the original and ever-present necessity of military organization and defense.