the joint caucus and the separate caucus, the public nomination paper, the one-per-cent., three-per-cent. or five-per-cent. rule whereby a party gains such official recognition only by throwing such a percentage of votes at some previous election—­in short, all the mass of legislation of this kind is the matter of the last few years.  In the writer’s opinion, with the possible exception of the public nomination paper, it is all mistaken.  Aimed at destroying the machine, it really intrenches the machine—­the professional politician—­in power.  The general public will not, and should not be compelled to do more work than is necessary.  If they actually vote at election it is all that can fairly be asked of them and more than one-third of them do.  They will not, and cannot, devote their time to politics all through the year.  The result is that all such elaborate schemes simply throw the game into the hands of the “town committee” or other permanent professional body.  If you have to hold a meeting in June, and give notice of a caucus in July, with as much formality as used to be required in publishing the bans of marriage, and then on a certain day in August do something else, and in September something still more, and file with the Secretary of State nomination papers in October, and have everything complete ten days before election day,—­the ordinary citizens who usually awake to the fact that there is an election about that time find it too late to have any voice in the nomination.  They go to the election itself to find an official ballot with two machine candidates for each office, and no hope of electing, even were it possible to nominate, a third.  In the old days, when they discovered that an improper candidate had been nominated, on the very eve of election they could arouse themselves and defeat him; under all these complicated systems it is too late.  One necessity for such legislation, however, arises from the Australian ballot itself; when that ballot carries party designations, who is to determine who is the official party candidate?  This problem is not, however, insoluble.  Indeed, it might be argued that it would be an excellent test to require the various so-called party nominees to run together, leaving to the voter to determine who was the regular one.  Certainly the legalizing of conventions, caucuses, and other nominating machinery, has led to great scandals.  Under such laws, whoever first gets possession of the hall at the time named would seem to be the regular candidate.  We have, therefore, in Massachusetts, seen the scandal of two groups of men making different nominations in a loud voice at the same time, one at the front of the hall, and the other at the back, and the courts had to decide who was the regular nominee.  In the opinion of most lawyers, they decided in favor of those who ought to have been the nominees rather than of those who in fact were.