call, and would most gladly forget. I am not going to specify, or give names of either localities or persons; but, knowing what I know, it is useless to approach me on this topic with the usual good-natured and optimistic, if somewhat unctuous and conventional, commonplaces on general uprightness and the tendency to improved conditions and a higher standard. I know better! I have seen legislators bought like bullocks—they selling themselves. I have watched them cover their tracks with a cunning more than vulpine. I have myself been blackmailed and sandbagged, while whole legislative bodies watched the process, fully cognizant at every step of what was going on. This, I am glad to say, was years ago. The legislative conditions were then bad, scandalously bad; nor have I any reason to believe in a regeneration since. The stream will never rise higher than its source; but it generally indicates the level thereof. In this case, I can only hope that hi my experience it failed so to do. Running at a low level, the waters of that stream were deplorably dirty.
That the legislative branch of our government has fallen so markedly in public estimation is not, I think, open to denial. To my mind, under the conditions I have referred to, such could not fail to be the case. It has, consequently, lost public confidence. Hence this popular demand for immediate legislation by the People,—this twentieth-century appeal to the Agora and Forum methods which antedate the era of Christ. It is true the world
