Mr. Speaker:  In the ten years of my membership in this House I have seldom taken advantage of the latitude afforded by general debate to discuss any question not immediately before the House.  But there is a question now before the country, particularly before the people of the state I have the honor to represent in part upon this floor, upon which I entertain very positive convictions, and which, I believe, is a proper subject for discussion at this time and in this place.  That question, bluntly stated, is this:  Is representative government a failure?  We are being asked now to answer that question in the affirmative.  A new school of statesmen has arisen, wiser than Washington and Hamilton and Franklin and Madison, wiser than Webster and Clay and Calhoun and Benton, wiser than Lincoln and Sumner and Stevens and Chase, wiser than Garfield and Elaine and McKinley and Taft, knowing more in their day than all the people have learned in all the days of the years since the Republic was founded.

And they tell us that representative government is a failure.  They do not put this declaration into so many words—­part of them because they do not know enough about the science of government to understand that the doctrines they advocate are revolutionary, and the rest of them because they lack the courage to openly declare that it is their intention to change our form of government, to subvert the system upon which our institutions are founded.  But that is in effect what they propose to do.

Every school boy knows that in a pure democracy the people themselves perform directly all the functions of government, enacting laws without the intervention of a legislature, and trying causes that arise under those laws without the intervention of judge or jury; while in a republic, on the other hand, the people govern themselves, not by each citizen exercising directly all the functions of government, but by delegating that power to certain ones among them whom they choose to represent them in the legislatures, in the courts of justice, and in the various executive offices.

It follows, therefore, that to substitute the methods of a democracy for the methods of a republic touching any one of the three branches of government is to that extent to declare that representative government is a failure, is to that extent subversive and revolutionary.

Now, it does not follow by any means that because a proposed change is revolutionary it is therefore unwise.  Taking it by and large, wherever the word “revolution” has come into human history it has been only another word for progress.  Because a nation has pursued certain methods for a long time it does not at all follow that those methods are the best, although when a nation like the United States, so bold and alert, so little hampered by tradition, so ready to try experiments, has clung to the same methods of government for 130 years, a strong presumption has certainly been established that these methods are the best, at least for that particular nation.