The thing has become a scandal and an oppression, for the liberties of American citizens and the just prerogatives of the states and the cities, as vital human groups, have been more infringed upon, reduced, and degraded by free legislation than ever happened in similar communities by the action of absolute monarchs.  It is a folly that works its insidious injury in two ways; first by confusing life by innumerable laws ill-advised, ill-drawn, mutually contradictory, ephemeral in their nature, inquisitorial in their workings; second, by creating a condition where any personal or factious interest can be served by due process of law, until at last we have reached a point where liberty itself has largely ceased to exist and we find ourselves crushed under a tyranny of popular government no less oppressive than the tyranny of absolutism.  Nor is this all; the mania for making laws has bred a complete and ingenious and singularly effective system of getting laws made by methods familiar to the members of all legislative bodies whether they are city councils, state legislatures or the national congress, and this means opportunities for corruption, and methods of corruption, that are fast degrading government in the United States to a point where there is none so poor as to do it reverence.  The whole system is preposterous and absurd, breeding not only bad laws, but a widespread contempt of law, while the personal freedom for which democracy once fought, is fast becoming a memory.

The trouble began as a result of one of the elements in the American Constitution which was the product not of the sound common sense and the lofty judgment of the framers, but of a weak yielding to one of the doctrinaire fads of the time that had no relationship to life but was the invention of political theorists, and that was the unnatural separation of the executive, legislative and judicial functions of government.  The error has worked far and the superstition still holds.  What is needed is an initiative in legislation, centred in one responsible head or group, that, while functioning in all normal and necessary legislative directions, still allows individual initiative on the part of the legislators, as a supplementary, or corrective, or protective agency.  No government functions well in fiscal matters without a budget:  what we need in legislative matters is a legislative budget, and by this phrase, I mean that the primary agency for the proposing of laws should be the chief executive of a city, or state or the nation, with the advice and consent of his heads of departments who would form his cabinet or council.