Ethics in Service

by William H. Taft

Consider the system of general direct primaries in the selection of judges. There is a ticket at the primaries on which something like twenty or thirty lawyers run for the Supreme Bench. Some of them go around and tell the electors how they will decide on questions after they get in. The qualifications of most of them as lawyers and as men are not known to the people. Some of them are prominent because they have been in the headlines of newspapers as figuring in sensational cases. Others have political prominence but no public experience to test their judicial capacity. Do you think this method of selection by the people would lead to the choice of a learned, skilled lawyer with that experience, courage and fine judicial quality that are to make him a great judge? Of course it would not. It has been my duty to select more judges in a term of four years than any other President, and I have had to look into and compare the results of selection of judicial candidates by popular general primary and by convention, so that I know what I am talking about when I say that the primary system has greatly injured the average capacity of our elective judiciary.

Why should we not use common sense in matters of government just as we use common sense in our own business? Why should we be afraid to tell the people that they are not fitted to select high judicial officers? They are not. You know you are not. You could not tell me who would be good judges for Connecticut, or for any state in the Union where you happen to live unless you went about and investigated the matter. If you are put in a position of responsibility, you have sense enough to know where to find out the facts and then to make the selection, but the people lack that opportunity. So how is the question to be solved? By electing a Chief Executive and charging him with the responsibility of selecting competent men to act as judges. That is what is meant by the short ballot.

Reformers-for-politics-only include as many vote-getting planks in a platform as they can get in it without regard to their consistency or inconsistency. They sometimes combine the short ballot with the initiative, referendum and recall though they are utterly at variance. The referendum is the submission of every issue to the people.

The short ballot, on the contrary, means putting up one or two men whose names shall not encumber the ballot. Have you ever seen these ballots? They are a yard long and a yard wide. They have a hundred and twenty names on them and the people are expected to make a selection. They are to make a selection of ten out of fifty or one hundred names. Why, it would seem to be mathematically demonstrable that that is absurd. But when some men get into politics and talk about the people, it seems as if they had to abandon ordinary logic. I am just as much in favor of popular government as anybody, but I am in favor of popular government as a means to attain good government, not in order to go upon the stump and say, "Vote for me because I am in favor of the people. The people are all wise and never make a mistake."

Now what is the initiative? In practice, it means that if 5 per cent of the electorate can get together and agree on a measure, they shall compel all the rest of the electorate to vote as to whether it shall become law or not. There is no opportunity for amendment, or for discussion. The whole legislative program is put into one act to be voted on by the people. Speakers will get up and claim that the millennium will be brought about by some measure that they advocate. Suppose it is voted in? It never has had the test of discussion and amendment that every law ought to have. I am not complaining of the movement that brings about this initiative and referendum, for that is prompted by a desire to clinch the movement against corruption, on the theory that you cannot corrupt the whole people and that the initiative and referendum mean detailed and direct government by the whole people. But the theory is erroneous. The whole people will not vote at an election, much less at a primary. When the people are thus represented at the polls by a small minority there is nothing that the politicians will not be able to do with that minority when they get their hands in.

This is still a new movement, for which we have little precedent to guide us, but we have seen politicians fit their methods to any form of government. Their chance is always through the neglect to vote on the part of the majority of the electorate and this new system calls out fewer votes than ever.

Now what is the referendum? It is a reference of the thing proposed by the initiative to the people who are to vote on it. These reformers-for-politics-only are never content to acquire a majority of the electorate vote for the adoption of the measure referred. They seem to love the promotion of the power of the minority.

What answer do the people themselves give with reference to the wisdom of the referendum? At many elections candidates run at the same time that questions are referred to the people, and what is the usual result of the vote? In Oregon, where they have tried it most, and where the people are best trained, they do sometimes get as much as 70 per cent of those who vote on candidates to vote on the referendum; but generally, as in Colorado, the vote at the same election upon the referendum measures is not more than 50 per cent—sometimes as low as 25 or 20 per cent—of those who vote for candidates. Why, in New York they were voting as to whether they should have a constitutional convention, and how did the total referendum vote compare with the total electorate? It was just one-sixth of that total.

They have tried it in Switzerland. We get a good many of these new nostrums from that country. They said in Switzerland, "These men vote for candidates, they shall vote on referendums." What was the result? The electors went up to the polls and solemnly put in tickets. When they opened the ballots, they were blanks. What does that mean? It means that the people themselves believe that they do not know how to vote on those issues, and that such issues ought to be left to the agents whom they select as competent persons to discuss and pass upon them in accordance with the general principles that they have laid down in party platforms. In Oregon, at the last Presidential election, the people were invited to vote on thirty-one statutes, long, complicated statutes, and in order to inform them, a book of two hundred and fifty closely printed pages was published to tell them what the statutes meant.

I ask you, my friends, you who are studious, you who are earnest men who would like to be a part of the people in determining what their policy should be, I ask you to search yourselves and confess whether you would have the patience to go through that book of two hundred and fifty closely printed pages to find out what those acts meant? You would be in active business, you would go down to the polls and say, "What is up today?" You would be told: "Here are thirty-one statutes. Here are two hundred and fifty pages that we would like to have you read in order that you may determine how you are to vote on them." You would not do it.