feebleness? Here has been shown its stalwart strength. He is sure
workingmen are incapable of managing large affairs? Let him look to the
cigar-makers--their capacity for organization, their self-restraint as
an industrial army, the soundness of their financial system, the mastery
of their employers in the eight-hour question. He believes the
intricacies of taxation and estimates of appropriation beyond the
average mind? He may see a New England town meeting in a single day
dispose of scores of items and, with each settled to a nicety, vote away
fifty thousand dollars. He fears state legislation, by reason of its
complexity, would prove a puzzle to the ordinary voter? Why, then, are
the more vexatious subjects so often shifted by the legislators to the
people?

The conservative objector is, first, apt to object before fully
examining what he dissents from, and, secondly, prone to have in mind
ideal conditions with which to compare the new methods commended to him.
In the matter of legislation, he dreams of a body of high-minded
lawgivers, just, wise, unselfish, and not of legislators as they
commonly are. He forgets that Congress and the legislatures have each a
permanent lobby, buying privileges for corporations, and otherwise
influencing and corrupting members. He forgets the party caucus, at
which the individual member is swamped in the majority; the "strikers,"
members employing their powers in blackmail; the Black Horse Cavalry, a
combination of members in state legislatures formed to enrich themselves
by plunder through passing or killing bills. He forgets the scandalous
jobs put through to reward political workers; the long lists of doubtful
or vicious bills reviewed in the press after each session of every
legislative body; the pamphlets issued by reform bodies in which perhaps
three-fourths of a legislature is named as untrustworthy, and the price
of many of the members given. The City Reform Club of New York published