Definition of the initiative.

Initiative

will not increase legislation.

tions of leadership political bosses that are susceptible to the influence of corrupt wealth. These men direct the political machine whose manipulators are liberally supplied with the ill-gotten wealth furnished by privileged interests for future favors and for protection against legislation that might be enacted in the interests of the people. Through this unholy alliance of corporate wealth with political bosses and money-controlled machines, incorruptible legislators and officials are driven into retirement and their places filled with creatures beholden to corporate wealth and monopoly interests. Against these evils the Referendum is a powerful weapon. It brings the government back to the people, destroying corruption and the mastership of the many by the few.

Q. What is the popular Initiative?

A. The popular Initiative is the right of a certain percentage of the voters, usually five to ten per cent., to propose a law, ordinance, or constitutional amendment for action by the legislature or decision at the polls or both. Under what is considered by many as the proper form, the measure which is petitioned by the requisite number of voters goes to the proper legislative body which may adopt or reject it, amend it, pass a substitute, or refrain from any action in reference to it. If the legislative body does not enact the measure as petitioned for, or if it takes adverse action in any form, the said measure together with the amendment, substitute or other action of the legislative body goes to the electorate for final decision at the polls.

Q. Would the Initiative result in the demand for a number of unnecessary or foolish laws?

A. Experience in Switzerland and in our Western States proves that legislation under the Initiative is on the whole wise and conservative. Any one who will take the trouble year after year to read the statutes passed by our legislatures will find it difficult to imagine how any system likely to be adopted in a free country could possibly produce more foolish or vicious laws than the system of law-making by final vote of a few men, largely under the

influence of private and special interests, now in operation in this country. In the long run the judgment of a free people is likely to be superior to the judgment of any small legislative body. When men follow their errors or private interests they diverge. A few men may go together in allegiance to some error or private interest, but when the people as a whole unite it must be by a cancellation of their errors and private interests. In large communities as a rule it is only on the basis of truth and right that the people can get together in controlling numbers. Moreover, the inertia of mankind and the effort and cost necessary to secure the requisite percentage of signatures to the petition render the Initiative essentially conservative. People will not ask for the passage of a law unless they are convinced that it is needed. This has been proved to be the case wherever the Initiative has been employed. But the possession of this right, together with the Referendum, has practically led to the disappearance of corrupt lobbies and other sinister influences that have long offered great temptations to the people's representatives and in many instances have rendered impossible the enactment of needed legislation while forcing to a successful issue laws that were not desired by the people and were inimical to their interests.

Q. What classes favor the Initiative?

The initiamentally

tive is funda

A. Those who desire real popular sovereignty; those who desire that the legislators elected by the people shall be representatives, and not misrepresentatives; those who desire to ter- democratic. minate the private monopoly of law-making; those who desire to kill the corporation lobby and abolish boss rule and machine government; those who desire to bring better men into politics, to simplify elections, to lessen the power of partnership, to stop class legislation, to elevate the press and educate the people, to open the door of progress to all wise measures of reform, to establish a reasonable safety valve for discontent and to take the next great step in the improvement of representative government in harmony with the whole trend of modern political history throughout the civilized world and with the fundamental demands of democracy.

The system is revolutionary.

Political liberty and representative government.

170. Arguments against the Initiative and Referendum *

The case against the initiative and referendum is thus forcibly stated by Senator Lodge in a speech directed against the Public Opinion Bill printed above:

As a matter of fact, no more fundamental and far-reaching measure has been presented to the legislature of Massachusetts within my recollection. It was not a mere change in legal practice nor an alteration of long-established laws, nor even a constitutional change which was proposed. The bill involves all these and much more, for if carried out logically to its full extent, it would mean nothing less than a complete revolution in the fabric of our Government and in the fundamental principles upon which that Government rests. This may seem an extreme statement, but I think it is susceptible of absolute demonstration, because this bill, if it should become law, would undermine and ultimately break down the representative principle in our political and governmental system.

To make my meaning perfectly clear it will be necessary to consider briefly and historically the principles upon which all government rests and the instruments by which it is carried on. Our division of the departments of government into executive, legislative, and judicial, with which we are entirely familiar, and which the Constitution of the United States made coördinate and independent, is not a modern classification, but represents in whole or in part the recognized and essential foundations of all government. . . .

Wherever you look into the history of the last four hundred years you will find that the rise and the power of the representative body are coincident with freedom, and that the rise of despotism is coincident with the breakdown of whatever representative bodies there may have been. The history of the representative principle in modern times is the history of political freedom, and this representative principle is the great contribution of the Englishspeaking people and of the period since the Renaissance to the

science of government. Without that principle the democracy of Greece failed to build up a nation coextensive with the spread of the Greek settlements and conquests while that of Rome sank under a complete despotism. The Empire of the first Napoleon and of the third Napoleon as well were both reared on the ruins of the legislative bodies of France. Examples might be multiplied, but nothing is clearer than that every lasting advance which has been made toward political freedom has been made by and through the representative principle. Even to-day the struggle in Russia seeks, as its only assurance, the establishment of a representative body. Indeed the movement for a larger political freedom and for the right of the people to take part in their own government which has filled Europe for the last century is penetrating now to countries outside the pale of Western civilization, and the existence of this movement in Persia, in Turkey, and in China is manifested by the efforts in all these countries toward securing representative institutions.

In a word, it may be said that the advance toward political liberty and the establishment of the right of the people to govern have been coincident and gone hand in hand with the progress of the representative principle. It is also to be noted that the independence of the judiciary, the other great bulwark of liberty and of the rights of the individual, has followed everywhere upon the growth and success of the representative principle in government. The destruction of this principle, therefore, would mean reaction and the return to the system of an all-powerful executive. There could be no greater misfortune to free popular government than to weaken or impair the principle of representation, and the quickest way to break that principle down is to deprive the representative bodies of all responsibility and turn them into mere machines of record. You cannot take from your representative bodies all power of action and all responsibility and expect them to survive. If you bind a man's arm to his side and prevent its use and motion the muscles weaken, the arm withers and in time becomes atrophied and useless. If you force the legislature to deal

The danger despotism.

of executive

The instruc

tion of representatives vs.

the mandate.

with certain measures under a mandate which practically compels them to vote upon these measures in only one way you take from your representatives all responsibility and all power of action and the representative principle in your government will atrophy and wither away until it becomes in the body politic, like some of those rudimentary organs in the natural body, quite useless and often a mere source of dangerous disease. This Public Opinion Bill does this very thing, for it aims directly at the destruction of representative responsibility, and I think, although it received the support of many excellent people who did not pause to consider it carefully, that it found its origin among those small groups whose avowed purpose is to destroy our present institutions and forms of government and replace them with socialism or anarchy. Every constituency, I repeat, has the right now, as always, to pass instructions to its representative if it can agree upon them, just as it has the right of petition; but that is a very different thing from the final determination by ballot of every possible abstract question by a popular vote. It is worth while to emphasize this difference, for it throws light upon the whole question. The constituency, in the first place, instructs only its own representatives. It does not undertake to instruct the representatives of other constituencies, but only its own, thereby recognizing the representative character of the member or Senator or Congressman whom it has chosen. The instructions, moreover, are passed by a meeting where they can be discussed, amended, and modified, and where the arguments of both majority and minority can be heard. The, constituency in passing instructions is not confined to a blind, categorical "yes" or "no" upon a question where neither amendment, discussion, nor modification is possible. They act themselves only with the same safeguards which have been thrown about the passage of laws in the legislature. They are not the helpless instruments of a plebiscite, but freemen setting forth their opinions in the manner which the history of free government has consecrated. Instructions from a constituency are the very antithesis of the "mandate" which it is proposed to extort or