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depends upon whether or not the remedy is sufficiently discussed to be thoroughly understood. The first popular impulse to right a wrong often results in com mitting another wrong.
It is in putting
clamorous advocacy of measures to limit the powers of those charged with the administration of our highly com plicated government, and to increase the direct intervention of the public in
clearly before the people the nature of civic ills and the character and effect of proposed remedies that men who have had the benefit of systematic university
the conduct of its operations.
training may best justify their advan
tages.
tives chosen from among the people for the purpose. is one that is almost
Public attention has been and is now focussed on these wrong tendencies. Recognizing the existence of evils, two
as old as recorded history, and all re corded history proves its fallacy. But it is said that in the workings of repre
classes of remedies are presented. One class deals with forms of government
sentative government representatives do not represent the people. I believe that
and new rules of conduct; another class addresses itself to a consideration of the character of the men who make our laws and carry on our public affairs. It is characteristic of our race that we are more prone, in the face of civic
to be a superficial comment.
ills, to the making of new laws than to securing a better class of public ser vants. We pass laws very much as the Chinese buy a paper prayer and hang it up to placate their gods. A common expression on many lips is “there ought to be a law about that." We are in
truth a law-ridden people; and this tendency is encouraged and stimulated by those who seek popular favor by pointing to easy remedies for obvious ills. Not satisfied with the ever swell ing volume of statute laws, we are now urged to tinker with our Constitutions. There is nothing new in this kind of demagoguery. Mommsen, writing of the Rome of Cato's time, says: — In reality these demagogues were the worst
enemies of reform. While the reformers insisted above all things and in every direction on moral amendment, demagogism preferred to insist on the limitations of the powers of the govern ment, and the extension of those of the bur gesses.
So in our own day there is much
The idea that a busy, prosperous, commercial people will, or can, make or
administer laws better than representa
Represen
tatives have and, being human, always will, from time to time fail in their duty; but in the long run our represen tative bodies must and do give expres sion to precisely what the matured thought of the majority of the people demands. They may not yield at once
to a spasmodic and artificially stimu lated emotion induced by one particular class of society for its own ends as against all other classes. God forbid that they
should! But they are inevitably con trolled by the deliberate thought-out will of the people.
Impatient reformers,
desirous of securing the prestige of immediate success in the advocacy of their nostrums, may chafe at delays.
But you who have had the advantage of learning the lessons of the past will, I am confident, lend your influence to the maintenance of a system of govern
ment which protects the legitimate in terests of a commercial people from destruction by the sudden gusts of popu lar passion.
You will carefully examine
existing laws and institutions before lending your aid to their overthrow. No system of law can be devised that will automatically work good. All laws
must be administered by human agen
