With one breath we are asked to renounce the old system because the people make mistakes, and with the next breath we are solemnly assured that if we adopt the new system the people will not make mistakes.  I confess I am not mentally alert enough to follow that sort of logic.  It is too much like the road which was so crooked that the traveler who entered upon it had only proceeded a few steps when he met himself coming back.  You cannot change the nature of men, Mr. Chairman, by changing their system of government.  The limitations of human judgment and knowledge and conscience which render perfection in representative government unattainable will still abide even after that form of government is swept away, and the ideal will still be far distant.

Let it not be said or imagined, Mr. Speaker, that because I protest against converting this Republic into a democracy therefore I lack confidence in the people.  No man has greater faith, sir, than I have in the intelligence, the integrity, the patriotism, and the fundamental common sense of the average American citizen.  But I am for representative rather than for direct government, because I have greater confidence in the second thought of the people than I have in their first thought.  And that, in the last analysis, is the difference, and the only difference, so far as results are concerned between the new system and that which it seeks to supplant; it is the fundamental difference between a democracy and a republic.  In either form of government the people have their way.  The difference is that in a democracy the people have their way in the beginning, whereas in a republic the people have their way in the end—­and the end is usually enough wiser than the beginning to be worth waiting for.

We count ourselves the fittest people in the world for self-government, and we probably are.  But fit as we are we sometimes make mistakes.  We sometimes form the most violent and erroneous opinions upon impulse, without full information or thoughtful consideration.  With complete information and longer study, we swing around to the right side, but it is our second thought and not our first that brings us there.  Our intentions are always right, and we usually get right in the end; but it often happens that we are not right in the beginning.  It behooves us to consider long and well before we pluck out of the delicately adjusted mechanism by which we govern ourselves the checks and brakes and balance wheels which our forefathers placed there, and the wisdom of which our history attests innumerable times.

The simple and primitive life of civilization’s frontier has given way to the most stupendous and complex industrial and commercial structure the world has ever known.  Incredible expansion, social, political, industrial, commercial—­but representative government all the way.  At not one step in the long and shining pathway of the Nation’s progress has representative government failed to respond to