CHAPTER III

GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY

You have given the people of this country so many persons to select for office that they have not time to select them, and have to leave it to professionals-that is to say, the professional politicians, which, reduced to its simplest term, is the boss of the district. When you vote the Republican or Democratic ticket, you either vote for the names selected by one machine or the names selected by the other machine. . . . The remedy is contained in one word, simplification. Simplify your processes, and you will begin to control; complicate them, and you will get farther and farther away from their control. Simplification! Simplification! Simplification! is the task that awaits us: to reduce the number of persons voted for to the absolute workable minimum-knowing whom you have selected, knowing whom you have trusted, and having so few persons to watch that you can watch them. That is the way we are going to get popular control back in this country, and that is the only way we are going to get popular control back.

Address to the Civic League of St. Louis, March 1909.

THE position of State Governor in the United States has no true analogy in English political life. The forty-eight States differ from a County in England, a Department in France, and a Government in Russia, in that their powers are original, not devolved. The thirteen colonies that banded together in 1775 to fight the War of Independence became in 1783, when the victory had been won, thirteen sovereign States, and when in 1787 the Constitution of the United States

was formulated, it conferred on the Federal Government only such powers as the individual States had chosen voluntarily to surrender. These original thirteen States determined by their precedent the position of the thirty-five subsequently admitted into the Union, the governing factor in their relation to the Federal Government being the principle that any powers not expressly conferred on the latter by the Constitution remain in the hands of the State.

The States themselves differ in the details of their institutions, but under the Constitution all must maintain a Republican form of government, which is invariably represented by a Governor and two Houses of Legislature, a Senate and an Assembly. In its main features, therefore, the State Government is a replica in little of the Federal, the Governor corresponding to the President, and the two branches of the legislature to the Senate and House of Representatives at Washington. The Governor, unlike the bearer of that title in a British colony, is not appointed by the central Government, but elected by the voters of the State, Washington having no concern with or control over him unless he should come into collision with the Constitution or a Federal law.

While each State has its own Constitution, the position of the Governor is substantially the same in all. He holds office in some cases for two years, in some for three or four. His salary varies from as low as 2,500 dollars (Vermont) to as high as 12,000 (Illinois). In New Jersey the

term is three years and the salary 10,000 dollars. The Governor is the chief executive of the State, as the President is of the Union, and he enjoys the same power of veto over legislation. He has extensive powers of appointment, which he regularly exercises in favour of his political supporters, and limited powers of removal. Since he sits in neither of the two Houses of Legislature, and addresses them only in messages delivered annually or on special occasions, his direct influence over legislation is usually comparatively small. His real power depends on his personality. A forceful Governor, like a forceful President, can find means of initiating extensive programmes, as men like Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson have demonstrated in both capacities.

It was as candidate for an office involving such responsibilities that Mr. Wilson was nominated at the New Jersey State Convention in September 1910, the actual election falling in the following November. The choice of the President of Princeton as candidate for the highest executive office in the State, and Mr. Wilson's acceptance of the invitation thus extended, were unexpected, but not intrinsically remarkable, remarkable, events. It has already been seen that the idea of a public career, if circumstances should so shape themselves, had taken an early hold on the future President's mind, and during his later years at Princeton he had been in much request as a speaker outside the borders both of the university and of the State. He addressed Chambers of Commerce on the control of public companies, Bar Associations on

the constitutions and functions of government, Bankers' Associations on financial topics, Civic Leagues on electoral and administrative reform, and educational gatherings of every variety on subjects with which his position at Princeton particularly qualified him to deal. He was known as a radical and a democrat, and-what is not necessarily implied by the latter term-a Democrat in the political sense.

But if Mr. Wilson's entry into active political life was not in itself remarkable, there were certain features connected with his adoption that did make both the nomination and the acceptance surprising. Nothing could be more antagonistic to Mr. Wilson's political ideals than the principles, if principles they could be called, that governed the tactics of the Democratic (and equally of the Republican) Party in New Jersey; and nothing was calculated to be more fatal to the aims of the professional politicians than the election of the candidate of their choice. But the Democrats wanted office at any cost. They had not a man who could carry the Governorship on his own or the party's merits. Woodrow Wilson could carry it, and the Democratic caucus had little doubt that once they had him elected they could bend him to their purposes, as they bent every holder of public office from Governor to sanitary trustee. That accounts for the party's side of the transaction. Mr. Wilson's acceptance is easier to explain. He had lived for twenty years in New Jersey. He had no illusions on the condition of the public administration, dominated as it had been for a