of the office for which the person is a candidate for one year, and the legitimate expenses are specified; that is to say, public meetings, printing, postage, and head-quarters expenses.  Probably no one regrets the prevalence of extravagant expenditures more than persons who are themselves in public life.  If the bosses of many State machines were consulted in private, they would agree that the only really legitimate expenditures are the hiring of halls, and the mailing of at most one printed circular to every voter in the district.  The Missouri law of the same year fixes a limit of expenditure of one dollar per hundred of votes thrown at the last election for the office for which the person is a candidate, which, in an ordinary congressional district of say fifteen thousand voters, would be one hundred and fifty dollars—­certainly little enough.  Voters very generally have to be registered.

[Footnote 1:  Bill signed by President Taft, June, 1910.]

As is familiar to the reader, there has been a decided movement for the direct election by the people of United States senators, a large majority of the States, and the Democratic party in all States, having in the last few years expressed themselves in favor of a change in that particular.  Until within a few years it was thought only possible by Constitutional amendment, but the example of Oregon and other States has shown that it may be done by means of a law providing for the expression of the preference of the voters, and this may even be made a party ballot.  That is to say, voters at party caucuses, or even at elections where the ballots are so marked, may express their preference for this or that candidate for the United States Senate, and the moral obligation will then be on the State legislature, or at least on its members of the corresponding party, to vote for the candidate so nominated.  This has been universally done in the case of election of the United States President by the force of public opinion; no instance is on record of an elector having voted differently, or of a bribe or even of an attempt to bribe.  But with legislation—­statute law not being so strong as the unwritten law, contrary to the popular opinion—­it is by no means certain that this result will happen.  The law has worked in Oregon, where first adopted, with the striking result that a Republican legislature elected a Democratic United States senator; but if the writer is correctly informed, the contrary has been the case in Illinois.  The movement for the direct nomination of members of the lower house of Congress also exists in many States.  “Direct nomination” of course means a nomination by the mass of voters, either in assembly or by a written list.  The value of this reform is probably exaggerated.  Direct nominations in the city of Boston recently had the somewhat amusing result that there were two or three times as many names on the nominating petitions as voted in the election, and that one gentleman, indeed, fell short of his nominating petition by nearly ninety per cent.