elections are largely a matter of personal choice, this kind of purely personal organization and effort often answers the purpose of enabling voters to concentrate their ballots effectively. Several well-known men may offer themselves publicly as candidates and each of them carry on, through a personal organization, a campaign for the suffrages of his fellow-citizens. In the governmental affairs of the country at large, however, and for the most part in the governmental affairs of the states, the opportunity for personal choice is very limited; it is impossible that any man should be really personally known to a very large proportion of the people in the United States, or even in any state. There are questions of government upon one side or the other of which the voters hold strong opinions; and men are known and are commended to the voters as candidates by the positions they have taken upon those questions, and, if they have already held office, by public report of the way in which they have performed their duties in carrying out certain policies or applying certain rules of conduct. Candidates, therefore, in these larger fields are regarded chiefly as the representatives of principles and policies, and so far as they are affected by personal popularity, that is chiefly based upon the effectiveness with which they have already represented those principles and policies.

These great governmental questions are not temporary and special to particular elections. There are some questions of policy which are never settled permanently, because new conditions are always arising to serve as occasions for their reconsideration. For example, the subject of a protective tariff has furnished questions upon which the people of the United States have divided for a century, and probably will divide for an indefinite time to come. These tariff questions reappear in one form or another at every national election when they do not happen to be for the moment thrust aside

by some other special and absorbing issue. The fact that the people have decided in favor of a high tariff at one time, or for a low tariff at another time, has no effect whatever to prevent the same old battle being fought over and over again.

Series of questions relating to the extension of slavery, merging into the questions relating to the continuance of the war for the Union, and these merging again into the questions relating to the results of the war and the political and economic status of former slaves, have continued from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. In the same way a long dividing line may be seen separating people of different ways of thinking upon questions relating to the currency. In one form or another, for a long series of years, the controversy has been waged between the advocates of currency based upon a gold value, on the one hand, and the advocates of a currency based upon the idea that the Government can give it value in the form of greenbacks or depreciated silver, on the other.

There are certain distinct and fundamentally opposed schools of thought and opinion which range portions of the people on different sides of many questions through long series of years. For example, the people of the United States during most of our national existence have been divided between the advocates of a strict construction and the advocates of a liberal construction of the Constitution. One would confine the powers of the National Government within the narrowest possible limits; the other would find in the Constitution all the powers that any nation can have except as they are expressly limited by the terms of the Constitution. One tends to carry the independence of local self-government to an extreme; the other tends to carry the centralization of national government to an extreme. This fundamental difference of view has divided the people of the country in

a long series of successive elections upon many specific and important questions; upon the power of the National Government to carry on internal improvements; to restrict the extension of slavery; to establish a national bank; to charter Pacific railroads; to maintain a tariff for protection as distinguished from a tariff for revenue only; to acquire and incorporate in the United States additional territory; to acquire and govern so-called colonial possessions; upon the extent of the power to regulate commerce, of the taxing power, of the police power, of the treaty-making power.

It is true that in recent years some professed disciples of Jefferson have advocated measures of national control which would have led that apostle of the least government possible to regard Hamilton as a strict constructionist; but these are probably temporary aberrations. The same division between the two schools of interpretation of the Constitution still exists and in the nature of things must continue.

With these continuing questions and permanently divided schools of opinion the association of the advocates of each opposing view is bound to be repeated in many successive political campaigns. This association is not occasional and fortuitous; it is, to a great extent, predetermined and customary. The men who entertain positive views upon one side or the other of the great political questions become known; they acquire the habit of working together; they rely upon each other's coöperation. The association is practically continuous, because the process in which the advocates of these differing views are engaged is continuous. Our people are so constituted that no sooner is an election over and the result declared than the supporters of the defeated candidates and the advocates of the rejected views immediately begin their efforts to secure a reversal of the result at the next election. The ever-present consciousness that in a year, or two years, or four years there will be an opportu

nity to substitute victory for defeat is a great element in the peaceable and good-natured acceptance of the results of our elections by those who are defeated. The very intensity of the minority's belief that its candidates and its policies are better than those which for the time being have a majority of the votes creates an expectation that when the test of performance is applied to the successful candidates and the test of application is applied to the accepted policies, their inferiority will be demonstrated, so that the public verdict will be reversed.

This continuous association and effort on the part of a great number of men for the accomplishment of a common purpose through a continuous series of political struggles of course involves continuous organization, for the work of a great number of men for a common purpose through a long period of time cannot be carried on at all without organization. These continuous, voluntary, organized associations to secure the adoption of policies upon which their members agree and the choice of officers who will represent those policies are what we call political parties.

As new issues arise under the changing needs and difficulties and desires which time brings to every community, they find these organizations already in existence, and if the new issues are such as to demand settlement or excite great interest among the voters it becomes immediately necessary for the existing political organizations to determine what positions they will assume upon the new questions. This determination is naturally based either upon the application of the general principles of government and the general ideas of policy which have controlled the respective parties, or upon an estimate of the support which one position or another will receive from the voters of the country, or upon a combination of the two. Sometimes the lines which separate the voters of the country upon one side or the other of a

new question run across lines of cleavage between the old parties, and the comparative importance of the new question is such that great bodies of voters dissolve their association with an old party and form a new association with another party; as, for example, the positions taken by the Democratic and Republican parties on the subject of the currency a few years ago led many gold Democrats to go over to the Republican party and many free-silver Republicans to go over to the Democratic party. Occasionally, the attitude of all existing parties is so unsatisfactory to the people much interested in a new question that they undertake to form a new party for the furtherance of their views on that particular question. Generally, these attempts show that the people who are interested by a particular new issue over-estimate its importance and their attempts to form a new party fail; but we have had one signal example the other way-in the formation of the Republican party in 1856 by the men who were not satisfied with the attitude of either the Democratic or the Whig party in regard to the extension of slavery. As a rule, however, each old political party adds to the list of principles and policies which it advocates a view upon each great new question in accordance with the opinions of a majority of its members, and, with some slight changes and realignment of dissatisfied members, old parties go on representing their membership upon the new questions as well as upon the old questions in reference to which their parties were organized. In time, as the original questions which led to the formation of a party disappear, the party continues with an organization representing its members no longer for the specific purposes which brought them together, but for the new purposes which they have agreed upon through the processes of their party organization and activity.