extinguished, the politicians have not been ousted at
all, but rather the reverse, as we shall see later on.

The fruit of the primaries -- the conventions ema-
nating from them and their choice of candidates to
offices -- remaining almost as bitter as before, people
hit on the idea of doing away with the conventions
altogether by law. In many States a new set of laws
was enacted which substituted for the representative
system in the party Organizations a direct system.
These laws established direct primaries in which the ad-
herents of a party, duly qualified, nominate, in legal
form, the candidates of their party for most of the
elective offices in the county and even in the State. In
some places, and especially in the South, direct nomi-
nations, without the medium of conventions, have been
already adopted spontaneously by the parties them-
selves, without however applying to territorial areas
larger than the county (except in one State). But
the legalized and State-wide mode of direct nomina-
tions of party candidates is quite recent and is still
in the experimental stage. The results which this
method seems to bring about or which it promises to
secure will be farther examined. Anyway, the old
extra-legal system obtains still in more than a half of
the States, and in those very States in which the law
has instituted direct primaries the nomination for some
elective offices, such as Presidential electors or delegates
to national conventions, are still made by conventions
of delegates. We have therefore to proceed to consider
them in their turn.

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