SPEECH ON CLOSING THE CONVENTION

SEPTEMBER 10, 1915

At the closing session of the convention of 1915, and after delivery of the address below, the following tribute to Mr. Root, as its presiding officer, was unanimously adopted:

Resolved, That the thanks of this convention be tendered to the Honorable Elihu Root for the ability, fairness and courtesy which have distinguished his services as president of this convention.

UR work is done. The long, hard months during which we have been wrestling with questions of government, and character has been struggling with character in the discussions of the proposed amendments to the constitution, are over. We have produced a revised constitution which is not a model of style, of form, of brevity, of theoretical perfection. Any one of us with the models which are available, could have produced in the solitude of his own office a more perfect and harmonious scheme of government; but this instrument is fitted by patience, experience, knowledge and effort, to the actual conditions of the life of a people which has been growing for three centuries, of a people living one half upon the sea and the other half in the river valleys and among the hills and on the shores of the Great Lakes, of a people of ten million with varied industries and interests and prepossessions and prejudices and sympathies; and to know the full meaning of all the provisions which this instrument contains one must have studied and know the life of the people of all the great state of New York. When we came to our work on the sixth of April last, we addressed ourselves first to studying the conditions of the government of the state. We found that there were serious evils which had resulted in an enormous increase of expenses from twelve million

dollars at the time of the last convention to forty-two million dollars at the time of our meeting; an enormous increase of indebtedness and an apparent impossibility of meeting all attempts to curtail expenses or to prevent the further accumulation of debt. Upon further inquiry we found that the executive and administrative organization of the state was loose, confused, ill-regulated; that one hundred and fifty and more separate agencies were going about the business of government, responsible to no one in particular, each one spending all the money that it could get, and there was no such concentration of responsibility and power as was necessary to bring to accountability the agencies of the state which were plunging our people into extravagance and debt. We found that the legislature of the state had declined in public esteem and that the majority of members of the legislature were occupying themselves chiefly in the promotion of private and local bills, of special interests, with which they came to Albany, private and local interests upon which apparently their reëlections to their positions depended, and which made them cowards, and demoralized the whole body. We found that the course of justice was slow and expensive and hindered by technicalities and subtleties which kept honest men out of their rights. We found that the great offices, the hundreds of offices of the state were swarming with men who held sinecures, who were put in their places for the benefit of particular organizations and not for the services that they were to render to the state. We have done our best to devise and adopt measures which will remedy these evils. When one's automobile acts strangely and goes wrong, one does not berate it or pass resolutions about it; one endeavors to put one's finger on the fault in the machinery and correct the fault. The capacity of a people for self-government is measured by their ability to create and maintain institutions that will govern. With

out the institutions of government there can be no government, for the vote alone accomplishes nothing, but in the creation of an active agent. We were elected by the people of the state to overhaul the machinery of government, to ascertain if we could where in that complicated mechanism lay the fault that caused the evils under which they suffered. We have done the best we could. We have given our best brain, our best strength, our best devotion to the accomplishment of that duty and now we submit our work to the people of the state, and we ask of them only this: As we have been your loyal and devoted servants, doing your behest to the best of our ability, be loyal to us and give at least a presumption in favor of the work that we have done. If you find it wrong, reject it; but do not reject it upon light or unconsidered reasons, for it is the best that your representatives, elected by you, devoting themselves for all this long summer to the work, can do to cure the evils of your government.

There are two special things which I wish to say before the close of this convention. One is - and I would like to say it to every citizen of the state- one is that this convention has risen above the plane of partisan politics. It has refused to make itself or permit itself to be made the agency of party advantage except as faithful service for the state is a benefit to party. It has refused to engage in the play of politics. No caucus and no conference has marred the impartiality of our proceeding. No resolution has bound the judgment or conscience of any member of this convention. Our conception of our duty was to leave behind strife of party, and upon the higher plane of patriotism and love of country, to join all together, whatever our parties, in doing the best we could for the prosperity of our beloved state. One effect of this course of conduct on our part has been that the debates of this convention compare most favorably

with the debates of any parliamentary body which has sat in deliberation during the lifetime of any man in this room. I have seen and heard the debates of many parliamentary bodies and never have I heard or read debates in which the matter was more relevant, the discussion more earnest and to the point, the attempts at display less conspicuous, the speeches for home consumption more infrequent, and real discussion, that real open, public discussion of a deliberative body, which is the essential process of free self-government, on a higher level than in this convention of the year 1915.

And another result of this course of conduct has been that the thirty-three measures adopted by the convention have been adopted by these astonishing votes: Twelve of the measures were adopted unanimously; twelve were adopted by majorities of more than ten to one; of the remaining nine, two were adopted by majorities of more than seven to one, two by majorities of more than four to one, two by majorities of more than three to one, and three by majorities of more than two to one. That, in an assemblage composed of two different and perennially conflicting parties was the result of common patriotic contributions by the members of both parties towards the perfection of measures in a convention which was doing its work with a sense of the dignity of the people it represented, and not for party advantage.

All the great measures of this convention were adopted not only by the votes, the affirmative votes of a majority of the Republicans but by the affirmative votes of a majority of the Democrats in the convention. The executive reorganization plan, commonly called the short ballot, was adopted by the votes of ninety-seven Republicans in the affirmative and fifteen in the negative, and of twenty-eight Democrats in the affirmative and fifteen in the negative. The budget, that great new departure in the finance of the

state, was adopted by the affirmative vote of one hundred and one Republicans to two Republicans in the negative and of thirty-six Democrats in the affirmative to two in the negative. The city home rule bill was adopted by one hundred and two Republicans voting in the affirmative and two in the negative; by eighteen Democrats voting in the affirmative and fifteen in the negative. The county home rule bill, which completes the scheme, was adopted by ninety-one Republicans voting in the affirmative and nine in the negative; and thirty-seven Democrats voting in the affirmative and two in the negative.

The judiciary bill, that great measure which prescribes the reform in judicial procedure that in the best judgment of this convention will give the honest man the chance for his rights, was adopted by the affirmative vote of one hundred and three Republicans to one Republican in the negative and thirty-two Democrats to two Democrats in the negative. So that in substance, upon the great measures of this convention both parties of the state are united, both have given their suffrages in favor of the reforms that we propose.

One other thing I wish to say, and that is that similar evils to those we have found in our state government have been found in the governments of many other states. People of those states have had recourse to an abandonment or a partial abandonment of representative government. They have had recourse to the initiative and referendum and the recall, the recall of officers and the recall of decisions. In this convention we have offered the most irrefutable, concrete argument against those nostrums and patent medicines in government and in favor of the preservation of that representative government which is the chief gift of our race to freedom, by undertaking to reform representative government, instead of abandoning it and to make it worthy of its great function for the preservation of liberty.