discriminate between hundreds of unknown candidates for scores of obscure offices. It is no impeachment of the capacity of the people for self-government to allege that they cannot do such an absurd and unnecessary thing. The long ballot is the result, in part, of the people's jealousy of irresponsible power. They have demanded the right to retain over many public officials the only sort of popular control that, until recently, has been thought possible. But the device has failed, in many cases utterly and ignominiously. The development of irresponsible party organizations with complete control of the nominating machinery has turned the long ballot into an instrument of tyranny, inefficiency, and corruption. It has come to be a standard trick of the political machine to place at the head of the ticket, whenever it appears necessary for success, some respectable and well-known citizen who will be content to be a figurehead, or even, if pressed by an active public opinion, a man of the militant, progressive type, and then to load up the rest of the ticket with undesirable henchmen who can be depended upon to conduct their offices according to the dictates of the organization and to distribute the favors and the patronage at their disposal for the further entrenchment of corrupt politics. In most instances this trick succeeds, for the attention of the people is concentrated on the principal offices and in the nature of the case they have to depend upon the say-so of the party organizations as to the fitness of minor candidates. The result is that respectable men generally fill the big offices, while inefficiency and favoritism run riot among the rank and file of officialdom. Even when a militant reformer,

conscientious, able, energetic, with all the qualifications for rendering the highest type of public service, gets to be governor, or mayor, he finds himself checkmated and the practical working out of his plans hindered and perhaps stopped entirely by the leaden unresponsiveness of the men lower down in office whom he cannot remove and who cannot possibly be galvanized into the life of reform. In this way, administrations that start out with promise and glowing hope often end in disappointment and sometimes in dismal failure. The people do not get what they voted for. Not only is government kept ineffectual and wasteful, but the citizens' courage to strive for better things is checked and dissipated. Moreover, by short terms and frequent elections, the people find themselves breaking into the continuity of public policies and in danger of losing officials whose service is satisfactory and whose experience makes it more valuable than new officials could possibly render. If government is not for the office-holder but for the people, then short terms of office are a serious disadvantage.

One of the most conspicuous and promising democratic movements of the time goes under the name of the Short Ballot. It proposes to cut down the number of elective officers to a minimum and to concentrate their responsibility. By this means it is hoped to give the people a fair chance to be careful in the selection of the two or three or half dozen important officials voted for at one time, and to secure the full benefits of this more careful choice by giving to the few officials so elected authority to appoint all the others whose names now confuse the ballot. One of the means of

shortening the ballot is by the lengthening of the terms of elective officials. Now, experience shows that concentrated responsibility and long terms are dangerous to democracy where there is no effective means of correcting mistakes in the choice of men to carry the responsibility. That mistakes will sometimes be made is clear enough from the fact that often now they are made in respect to the most conspicuous offices. When we get a mayor or a governor to suit us, we wish that the term of office was at least four or six years. When we get one who is a failure, we would be willing to undergo the hardships of a new election within six months. When the executive is honest, able, and aggressive, we rejoice that he has power, and are tempted to load more upon him. We are willing to put almost everything into his hands. But when the executive is weak, wily, or witless, we straightway would diminish his powers, deeming him hardly fit to appoint his own private secretary.

The long term and concentration of responsibility are swords that cut both ways, unless we can dull one of the edges. The Recall is a device for doing just that thing. With it in good working order, the people may safely remove the shackles from their executive and legislative servants and allow them official tenures consonant with the expert nature of their functions. One of the most distressing spectacles in American politics is the people painfully curtailing at every possible point the powers of the boards of aldermen and the state legislatures, the very bodies which spring most directly from the people and whose free functioning is most essential to orderly political progress. The

Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall furnish a well-knit system of rational popular control, devised for the very purpose of supplanting the expensive handicaps that have been imposed upon public officials by the popular jealousy and distrust of irresponsible and frequently-abused power.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE RECALL OF APPOINTIVE OFFICERS

It has already been suggested in a preceding chapter that the Recall may be extended beyond its original scope and made to apply to public officials not elected, or not elected directly by the people. If the President or the members of the United States Senate were to be brought within its purview, the exercise of the right of Recall would probably be entrusted to another authority than the one originally responsible for the selection of the official to be recalled. When it is proposed to make Federal judges subject to the Recall, there is no thought of merely making them subject to removal by the authority that appointed them. They are to be recalled either by vote of Congress or by vote of the people.

Now, the opponents of the Recall principle, even when they are forced to admit the logical strength of the arguments in favor of the right of Recall of elective officers by the people or by the bodies who first elected them, deny absolutely any logical basis for the extension of the system beyond the scope of elections. They say that, bad as the Recall is in its practical effect when confined to the establishment of the people's right to revoke their own appointments, it would bring absolute chaos into government if the Demos were authorized