The test of fitness for judicial office should indisputably be higher and more technical than for other offices. That test should require special capacity and character, to be ascertained by careful investigation, exchange of views, open discussion and comparison of merits by responsible delegates or representatives charged with that particular duty and acting in public and personally accountable for mistake, perversion, or corruption. This test can be best secured by the convention system; practically it cannot be secured at all by any system of secret direct primaries.
Reform in the selection of judges, if their selection is to be by election, lies not in schemes to reform human nature by legislative nostrums and to destroy publicity and responsibility, but in making the voters appreciate that the government is theirs, that political power is theirs, that theirs is the duty to send competent representatives to conventions, that theirs is the responsibility of electing competent men, and that they are vitally interested in having a competent, impartial and independent judiciary. Political conventions will be reliable and responsive if the people will only see to it that competent, honest and patriotic men are elected to represent them. There is no other course unless we uproot our whole system of republican government.
Ten years of experimenting with our Election Law have produced the present hodge-podge under which no election is conducted without error and without inviting a lawsuit and from which all but experts and professional politicians turn away in irritation and disgust. The net result has been to complicate our elections and make them less and less responsive to the best public opinion, and more and more subject to the control of professional politicians, wire-pullers and bosses.
In conclusion, though repeating myself, I earnestly submit that there can be no greater menace to our political institutions and to government by the people than the prevailing tendency to weaken and impair the representative principle in our state governments by nominating executive and judicial officers through direct secret primaries instead of through public conventions composed of delegates or representatives duly chosen by the enrolled voters of the parties and charged with the duty of selecting competent and honest candidates and directly accountable to the locality they represent for the failure to perform that duty. These delegates represent the people of the various districts of the state; they come together in public; they exchange and discuss views, or at any rate have full opportunity for debate and criticism; they vote in public for this or that candidate, and then they return to their neighbors, to those who sent them and for whom they spoke and voted, and face accountability and responsibility. Is not such a proceeding much more likely to secure competent and honest candidates than the present system of leaving the voter at large to slip into a dimly lighted booth and secretly place a cross on an unidentifiable ballot? The convention system is sound and should be preserved; it alone will perpetuate our parties and our form of government, and in casting the representative principle aside, as is necessarily done in the direct primary system of nominations for state and judicial office, we are beginning a process which, if not checked, will end in what Lincoln called political suicide.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] Remarks before the Committee on Suffrage of the Constitutional Convention of the state of New York at Albany, June 16, 1915.
[65] Laws of 1911, ch. 891.
[66] Laws of 1913, ch. 820.
[67] Congressional Government, p. 97, and Constitutional Government in the United States, pp. 209, 210.