6 practical working of the elective franchise has rendered necessary a system of strictly party elections and conventions, unknown to the law or the constitution, which in effect regulates all political action. It is in vain that on the day of a general election the honest citizen, anxious to cast his ballot conscientiously, scans critically the various tickets laid before him in the desperate hope of making up one for himself composed of pure and capable men, when he has slothfully allowed the machinery of nominations to be controlled unopposed by those who may have found their interest in selecting candidates unworthy of respect or confidence. The trader in politics has not thus been idle. He has attended the ward meetings and has seen that judges and inspectors of election favorable to his views have been appointed ; he has nominated as delegates to conventions men who sympathize and work with him ; he has seen that at the delegate election in his precinct the ten or a dozen votes were cast, necessary to secure the return of his delegate; and when the nominating convention meets, he feels safe that the candidates which it will present for popular suffrage will be men who will reward him richly at the public expense, for the trifling exertions which he has made in their behalf—men, it may be, who will gain, in a short tenure of office, the wages to support them through years of this idle work. The honest citizen, who fondly fancies himself a free and independent voter, is in reality the slave of these men, who count him as part of the assets of their political capital. They go over the assessors’ lists and distribute the voters according to their political proclivities, and those who are assigned to the democracy, or to republicanism are regarded as the personal property of the respective candidates, as thoroughly as the horse that propels a cider mill—indispensable to his owner as a motive power, but utterly unconscious of the direction or purposes of his labors. Reform must begin at the beginning. Since these preliminary movements control all subsequent action, it is these preliminary movements that must be themselves controlled, and few understand how easily this would be accomplished by in
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