way along the same path in looking out for the material welfare of his own neighbors and supporters; that in fact he is derelict to his duty to them if he does not. I do not say that I believe this is sound. I say only that I can understand a man's having here a genuine moral problem. Again it becomes so much a matter of degree. It is not merely the question of whether or not he shall try to secure every possible advantage for his district. It may be the question whether he ought not to do something simply to give his district a fair show with the others so that any sacrifice that is to be made under the new policy will be a sacrifice fairly and evenly distributed, and so that it will not bear with extreme and unjust force on his constituents. The trouble with such an attitude is that it does very largely take the principle out of the matter altogether, and makes the problem of each separate industry, and the amount of duty on its products, an individual problem where his conscience may be easily stilled and his moral fibre weakened with each successive concession.

As I have already suggested, one thing which helps the representative out in matters of this kind is the force of the party organization and the party caucus. It is interesting to see the way in which caucus action has to some extent changed the problem of loyalty to district. It has substituted in certain measure the idea of strict loyalty to party and that is the problem which will concern us in the next lecture.

CHAPTER V

THE REPRESENTATIVE AND

HIS PARTY

The last problem we have to consider is the relation of the representative to his own party. I will begin by referring to certain statements by President Hadley in that lecture on the "Workings of our Political Machinery" to which I have referred before and which all of you should certainly read. It is full of the wisest comment. Mr. Hadley speaks of the difficulty, under our present system, of getting efficient legislation, due to the fact that to a very large extent our representatives are not sent to Congress to make laws or to govern the country; that under our constitutional system the President cannot govern alone and Congress cannot govern alone; that this separation leads often to such a dead-lock that the representative is much more concerned with problems of place and patronage and the wants of his district-questions which I dis

cussed briefly in the last lecture—than he is with questions relating to legislation in behalf of the general welfare. Mr. Hadley thinks that as a necessary consequence the political boss has become a more powerful figure in actual government than the elective representative of the people. I cannot consider in detail the many interesting suggestions which he makes in connection with these matters and I agree with him very largely in all that he says when his remarks are applied, as he suggests in one passage, to the workings of our political machinery at the end of the nineteenth century.

What I wish to suggest here is that I believe we have been going through a change in recent years which is of the utmost importance and which the future historian may write down as revolutionary in character. In his preface Mr. Hadley suggests that if anyone should take up the book a few years later he hopes that, though the events in the foreground may have changed, the reader will find the underlying principles yet of value. This was written in 1907 and is a striking illustration of how rapidly

changes may take place, or at least how rapidly we may become conscious of such changes. Unless I am completely mistaken in my diagnosis, this new development had only begun a few years before 1907 and has only come to show its full importance in the years since then.

Perhaps I can best indicate what I mean by this change by telling of a conversation I had with a bright young German who came to me on his travels with a letter of introduction about 1903. The first question he asked me was: "Who rules your country?" I began to reply by some explanation of our system of government, to which he said impatiently: "But I don't want any of your theories. I know your constitution by heart and have read my Bryce and all the other books thoroughly. I want to know the names of the men. Is it John Smith or William Jones, or who is it?" For the moment I was obliged to hesitate. I told him that if he had asked me that question a few years earlier I would have given him the names of a small group of Republican senators and I named as those who I