truly represent them, it is no representative government that we have but a base imitation of it.

Now the best, indeed the only infallible, way discovered by mankind for making sure that representatives actually represent is to have them directly selected by those they are to represent. Every obstacle placed between the people and their choice of representatives is a bar to representative government. Public officials who owe their selection for office to any one except the people themselves will naturally, inevitably, tend to represent, not the people, who did not select them, but the boss, or the special interest, or the political machine, or whatever it was, that did. The direct primary brings the official close to the people from the very beginning. It makes difficult the intervention of the boss. It puts a stumbling block in the way of the special interest. It tends strongly to make party nominees truly representative of the party members.

It works well. For fifteen years the direct primary has been found to be a workable, effective, and useful instrument of democracy. In a few states which tried the experiment of the presidential preference primary two years ago, the results were far more satisfactory than under the old convention system. The only difficulties in those states arose from the fact that a hybrid system was being used. The voters were trying to do two things at once express their preference for party candidate for president and select delegates to go to a national convention. The two things were incompatible. One of them was utterly superfluous. If the voters in those states had been asked only to cast their votes for their choice for party candidate, the result in every one of them would have been perfectly satisfactory and harmonious. If every state had had a presidential primary, the regrettable spectacle of the Chicago convention would have been an impossibility. The direct primary works; the presidential primary will work.

Various arguments are urged against the presidential primary, besides the one which we have sought to dispose of — that it is opposed to the principle of representative government.

It is said that the voters will not come to the polls. It is

hard enough to get them out for an election; to get them out 339 twice will be impossible. The answer is simple and based on experience. More will certainly come to the primary than come to a caucus under the old system to elect delegates to a convention; and every additional voter who can be brought to take part in the making of nominations is a clear gain for democracy.

The expense of a primary campaign will be so great, it is urged, that it will put a premium on wealth; only a rich man will be able to run for a nomination. But they have solved that problem in Oregon and New Jersey by strict laws limiting the amounts that may be expended.

It is contended that the people need leadership which the direct primary system does not encourage. The reverse is the fact. The direct primary produces leadership; the convention system produces bosses.

The real arguments against the presidential primary come from two kinds of persons: bosses and other usurpers of political power who know that their continued prestige and profit depends upon the success with which they interpose machinery between the voter and the ultimate selection of public officials; and conservative and cautious citizens who do not quite trust the mass of the voters to know what is best for them and to do it.

Every real believer in democracy, every one who thinks that the people on the whole and in the long run can be trusted to be right more often than they are wrong, every one who believes with De Tocqueville that the remedy for the evils of democracy is more democracy, every one with his face to the future and an abiding faith in the American people in his heart, should give his support to the proposal for the presidential primary.

SUNRISE: a morning of supernal beauty, fairy tale, the sea of a love-poem.

Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea has a perfect luminous dove color, the horizon being filled to a great height with greenish-golden haze, a mist of unspeakably sweet tint, a hue that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an impossibility. As yet the hills are nearly all gray, the forests also inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for the sun has but just risen above them, and vapors hang like a veil between. Then, over the glassy level of the flood, bands of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid gold begin to shoot and quiver and broaden; these are the currents of the morning, catching varying color with the deepening of the day and the lifting of the tide.

Then, as the sun rises higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the grays; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves through the vapory light, to left and right of the great glow. Only the city still remains invisible; it lies exactly between us and the downpour of solar splendor, and the mists there have caught such radiance that the place seems hidden by a fog of fire. Gradually the gold-green of the horizon changes to a pure yellow; the hills take soft, rich, sensuous colors. One of the more remote has turned a marvellous tone,

1 From Two Years in the French West Indies. Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission.

a seemingly diaphanous aureate color, the very ghost of gold. But at last all of them sharpen bluely, show bright folds and ribbings of green through their haze. The valleys remain awhile clouded, as if filled with something like blue smoke; but the projecting masses of cliff and slope swiftly change their misty green to a warmer hue. All these tints and colors have a spectral charm, a preternatural loveliness; everything seems subdued, softened, semi-vaporized, the only very sharply defined silhouettes being those of the little becalmed ships sprinkling the western water, all spreading colored wings to catch the morning breeze.

The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the landscape out of vapory blue; the hills all become greenfaced, reveal the details of frondage. The wind fills the waiting sails

green.

white, red, yellow, ripples the water, and turns it Little fish begin to leap; they spring and fall in glittering showers like opalescent blown spray. And at last, through the fading vapor, dew-glittering red-tiled roofs reveal themselves the city is unveiled.

A TROPICAL SUNSET 1

LAFCADIO HEARN

ALMOST to the zenith the sky flames up from the sea, one tremendous orange incandescence, rapidly deepening to vermilion as the sun dips. The indescribable intensity of this mighty burning makes one totally unprepared for the spectacle of its sudden passing: a seeming drawing down behind the sea of the whole vast flare of light. Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with vapor; frogs commence to make a queer bubbling noise; and some unknown creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high,

1 From Two Years in the French West Indies. Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission.

keen, as of a thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents, aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees of our hotel I hear a continuous dripping sound; the drops fall heavily, like bodies of clumsy insects. But it is not dew, nor insects; it is a thick, transparent jelly, a fleshy liquor that falls in immense drops. The night grows chill with dews, with vegetable breath; and we sleep with windows nearly closed.

STAND upon the peak of some isolated mountain at daybreak, when the night mists first rise from off the plains, and watch their white and lake-like fields as they float in level bays and winding gulfs about the islanded summits of the lower hills, untouched yet by more than dawn, colder and more quiet than a windless sea under the moon of midnight; watch when the first sunbeam is sent upon the silver channels, how the foam of their undulating surface parts and passes away; and down under their depths, the glittering city and green pasture lie like Atlantis, between the white paths of winding rivers; the flakes of light falling every moment faster and broader among the starry spires, as the wreathed surges break and vanish above them, and the confused crests and ridges of the dark hills shorten their gray shadows upon the plain. Wait a little longer, and you shall see those scattered mists rallying in the ravines, and floating up towards you, along the winding valleys, till they couch in quiet masses, iridescent with the morning light, upon the broad breasts of the higher hills, whose leagues of massy undulation will melt back and back into that robe of material light, until they fade away, lost in its lustre, to appear again above, in the serene heaven, like a wild, bright, impossible dream, foundationless and inaccessible, their very bases vanishing in the unsubstantial and mocking blue of the deep lake below.

1 From Modern Painters.