We have demagogues enough now, heaven knows, when election to an office assures the tenure of it for two or four or six years.  But if that tenure were only from hour to hour, if it were held at the whim of a powerful and unscrupulous newspaper, for example, or if it could be put in jeopardy by an affront which in the line of duty ought, we will say, to be given to some organization or faction or cabal, what could we expect?  Is it not inevitable that such a system would drive out of our public life the men of real character and courage and leave us only cowards and trimmers and time servers?  May we not well hesitate to introduce into our political system a device which, had it been in vogue in the past, would have made it possible for the Tories to have recalled Washington, the copperheads to have recalled Lincoln, and the jingoes to have recalled McKinley?

In all the literature of the age-long struggle for freedom and justice there is no phrase that occurs oftener than “the independence of the judiciary.”  Not one man could be found now among all our ninety millions to declare that our Constitution should be changed so as to permit the President in the White House or the Congress in the Capitol to dictate to our judges what their decisions should be.  And yet it is seriously proposed that this power of dictation shall be given to the crowd on the street.  That is what the recall means if applied to the judiciary; and it means the destruction of its independence as completely as if in set terms it were made subject to the President or the Congress.

Do you answer, “Oh, the recall will never be invoked except in an extreme case of obvious and flagrant injustice”?  I reply, “How do you know?” It is the theory of the initiative that it will never be invoked except to pass a good law, and of the referendum that it will never be resorted to except to defeat a bad law; but we have already seen how easily a bad law might be initiated and a good law referred.  And so it is the theory that the recall will be invoked only for the protection of the people from a bad judge.  What guaranty can you give that it will not be called into being to harrass and intimidate a good judge?  There never yet was a two-edged sword that would not cut both ways.

Mr. Chairman, I should be the last to assert that our present system of government has always brought ideally perfect results.  Now and then the people have made mistakes in the selection of their representatives.  Corrupt men have been put into places of trust, small men have been sent where large men were needed, ignorant men have been charged with duties which only men of learning could fitly perform.  But does it follow that because the people make mistakes in so simple a matter as the selection of their agents, they would be infallible in the incomparably more complex and difficult task of the enactment and interpretation of laws?  There was never a more glaring non sequitur, and yet it is the very cornerstone upon which rests the whole structure of the new philosophy.  “The people cannot be trusted with few things,” runs this singular logic, “therefore let us put all things into their hands.”