voting at primary elections?  True, sometimes the people of a state or a community do let a direct primary go by without asserting their authority as against the bosses.  The electorate of the United States is occasionally like the god Baal:  it is sometimes on a journey or it is sometimes asleep; but when it does awake, it does not resemble the god Baal in the slightest degree.  It is a great self-possessed power which effectually takes control of its own affairs.  I am willing to wait.  I am among those who believe so firmly in the essential doctrines of democracy that I am willing to wait on the convenience of this great sovereign, provided I know that he has got the instrument to dominate whenever he chooses to grasp it.

Then there is another thing that the conservative people are concerned about:  the direct election of United States Senators.  I have seen some thoughtful men discuss that with a sort of shiver, as if to disturb the original constitution of the United States Senate was to do something touched with impiety, touched with irreverence for the Constitution itself.  But the first thing necessary to reverence for the United States Senate is respect for United States Senators.  I am not one of those who condemn the United States Senate as a body; for, no matter what has happened there, no matter how questionable the practices or how corrupt the influences which have filled some of the seats in that high body, it must in fairness be said that the majority in it has all the years through been untouched by stain, and that there has always been there a sufficient number of men of integrity to vindicate the self-respect and the hopefulness of America with regard to her institutions.

But you need not be told, and it would be painful to repeat to you, how seats have been bought in the Senate; and you know that a little group of Senators holding the balance of power has again and again been able to defeat programs of reform upon which the whole country had set its heart; and that whenever you analyzed the power that was behind those little groups you have found that it was not the power of public opinion, but some private influence, hardly to be discerned by superficial scrutiny, that had put those men there to do that thing.

Now, returning to the original principles upon which we profess to stand, have the people of the United States not the right to see to it that every seat in the Senate represents the unbought United States of America?  Does the direct election of Senators touch anything except the private control of seats in the Senate?  We remember another thing:  that we have not been without our suspicions concerning some of the legislatures which elect Senators.  Some of the suspicions which we entertained in New Jersey about them turned out to be founded upon very solid facts indeed.  Until two years ago New Jersey had not in half a generation been represented in the United States Senate by the men who would have been chosen if the process of selecting them had been free and based upon the popular will.