experience has tended to produce, they will distrust appeals coming from the more cultivated classes, and be inclined to listen to loose-tongued demagogues. Once they have joined a party they will vote at the bidding of its local leaders, however personally unworthy.' While this section remains numerous, Rings and Bosses will always have materials ready to their hands. There is, however, reason to expect that with the progress of time this section will become relatively smaller. And even now, large as it is, it could be overthrown and bossdom extirpated, were the better citizens to maintain unbroken through a series of elections that unity and vigour of action of which they have at rare moments, and under the impulse of urgent duty, shown themselves capable. In America, as everywhere else in the world, the commonwealth suffers more often from apathy or shortsightedness in the upper classes, who ought to lead, than from ignorance or recklessness in the humbler classes, who are generally ready to follow when they are wisely and patriotically led.

1 Says Mr. Roosevelt: "Voters of the labouring class in the cities are very emotional: they value in a public man what we are accustomed to consider virtues only to be taken into account when estimating private character. Thus if a man is open-handed and warm-hearted, they consider it as being a fair offset to his being a little bit shaky when it comes to applying the eighth commandment to affairs of state. I have more than once heard the statement 'He is very liberal to the poor,' advanced as a perfectly satisfactory answer to the charge that a certain public man was corrupt." He adds, "In the lower wards (of New York City), where there is a large vicious population, the condition of politics is often fairly appalling, and the [local] boss is generally a man of grossly immoral public and private character. In these wards many of the social organizations with which the leaders are obliged to keep on good terms are composed of criminals or of the relatives and associates of criminals. . . . The president of a powerful semi-political association was by profession a burglar, the man who received the goods he stole was an alderman. Another alderman was elected while his hair was still short from a term in the State prison. A school trustee had been convicted of embezzlement and was the associate of criminals."-Century magazine for Nov. 1886.

CHAPTER LXIX

NOMINATING CONVENTIONS

IN every American election there are two acts of choice, two periods of contest. The first is the selection of the candidate from within the party by the party; the other is the struggle between the parties for the place. Frequently the former of these is more important, more keenly fought over, than the latter, for there are many districts in which the predominance of one party is so marked that its candidate is sure of success, and therefore the choice of a candidate is virtually the choice of the officer or representative.

Preceding chapters have described the machinery which exists for choosing and nominating a candidate. The process is similar in every State of the Union, and through all elections to office, from the lowest to the highest, from that of common councilman for a city ward up to that of President of the United States. But, of course, the higher the office, and the larger the area over which the election extends, the greater are the efforts made to secure the nomination, and the hotter the passions it excites.

Like most political institutions, the system of nominating the President by a popular convention is the result of a long process of evolution.

In the first two elections, those of 17891 and 1792, there was no need for nominations of candidates, because the whole nation wished and expected George Washington to be elected. So too, when in 1796 Washington declared his retirement, the dominant feeling of one party was for John Adams, that of the other for Thomas Jefferson, and nobody thought of setting out formally what was so generally understood.

In 1800, however, the year of the fourth election, there was somewhat less unanimity. The prevailing sentiment of the Federalists went for re-electing Adams, and the small conclave of Federalist members of Congress which met to promote his interest was deemed scarcely necessary. The Republicans, however (for that was the name then borne by the party which now calls itself Democratic), while united in desiring to make Jefferson President, hesitated as to their candidate for the vice-presidency, and a meeting of Republican members of Congress was therefore called to recommend Aaron Burr for this office. It was a small meeting and a secret meeting, but it is memorable not only as the first congressional caucus but as the first attempt to arrange in any way a party nomination.

In 1804 a more regular gathering for the same purpose was held. All the Republican members of Congress were summoned to meet; and they unanimously nominated Jefferson for President, and George Clinton of New York for Vice-President. So in 1808 nearly all the Republican majority in both Houses of Congress met and formally nominated Madison and

1 The President is now always chosen on the Tuesday after the first Monday in the November of an even year, whose number is a multiple of four (e.g. 1880, 1884, 1888), and comes into office in the spring following; but the first election was held in the beginning of 1789, because the Constitution had been then only just adopted.

Clinton. The same course was followed in 1812, and again in 1816. But the objections which were from the first made to this action of the party in Congress, as being an arrogant usurpation of the rights of the people-for no one dreamed of leaving freedom to the presidential electors -gained rather than lost strength on each successive occasion, so much so that in 1820 the few who met made no nomination,1 and in 1824, out of the Democratic members of both Houses of Congress summoned to the "nominating caucus," as it was called, only sixty-six attended, many of the remainder having announced their disapproval of the practice. The nominee of this caucus came in only third at the polls, and this failure gave the coup de grâce to a plan which the levelling tendencies of the time, and the disposition to refer everything to the arbitrament of the masses, would in any case have soon extinguished. No congressional caucus was ever again held for the choice of candidates.

2

A new method, however, was not at once discovered. In 1828 Jackson was recommended as candidate by the legislature of Tennessee and by a number of popular gatherings in different places, while his opponents accepted, without any formal nomination, the then President, J. Q. Adams, as their candidate. In 1831 however, and again in 1832, assemblies were held by two great parties (the Anti-Masons and the National Republicans, afterwards called Whigs) consisting of delegates from most of the States; and each of these conventions nominated its candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency. A third "national convention" of young men, which met later in 1832, adopted the

1 It was not absolutely necessary to have a nomination, because there was a general feeling in favour of re-electing Monroe.

2 The whole number was then 261, nearly all Democrats, for the Federalist party had been for some time virtually extinct.

Whig nominations, and added to them a series of ten resolutions, constituting the first political platform ever put forth by a nominating body. The friends of Jackson followed suit by holding their convention which nominated him and Van Buren. For the election of 1836, a similar convention was held by the Jacksonian Democrats, none by their opponents. But for that of 1840, national conventions of delegates from nearly all the States were held by both Democrats and Whigs, as well as by the (then young and very small) party of the Abolitionists. This precedent has been followed in every subsequent contest, so that the national nominating conventions of the great parties are now as much a part of the regular machinery of politics as the election rules contained in the Constitution itself. The establishment of the system coincides with and represents the complete social democratization of politics in Jackson's time. It suits both the professionals, for whom it finds occupation and whose power it secures, and the ordinary citizen who, not having time himself to attend to politics, likes to think that his right of selecting candidates is duly recognized in the selection of candidates by delegates whom he is entitled to vote for. it was soon seen to be liable to fall under the control of selfish intriguers and to destroy the chances of able and independent men, and was denounced as early as 1844 by Calhoun, who then refused to allow his name to be submitted to a nominating convention. He observed that he would never have joined in breaking down the old congressional caucus had he foreseen that its successor would prove so much more pernicious.

But

Thus from 1789 till 1800 there were no formal nominations; from 1800 till 1824, nominations were made by congressional caucuses; from 1824 till 1840,