During the past five years the agitation in favor of so modifying our
governmental system as to remove all those barriers which stand
between the will of the majority and its immediate execution has
attained formidable dimensions. That the defects which American
government has exhibited in many directions have been so serious and
so persistent as to furnish great justification for this agitation no
candid observer can deny. In both of the two ways upon which advocates
of the initiative and referendum lay so much stress, our
representative institutions have indeed sadly failed of being ideally
representative. Venality of individual legislators, or the control of
whole bodies of them by corrupt bosses, has resulted in innumerable
instances of special legislation for the benefit of powerful private
interests and contrary to the interests of the people. And it must be
admitted that apart from any question of venality or corruption there
has often been a degree of inertia in the enactment of enlightened and
progressive legislation which cannot be ascribed to legitimate
conservatism, but must be set down either to the unfitness of
legislatures for their responsibilities or to obstacles which an
extreme interpretation of constitutional restraints has unnecessarily
put in its way.
Nor can it be denied that the referendum and the initiative have
intrinsic value as remedies adapted to the counteracting of these two
evils respectively. Given a legislature owned by special interests, or
controlled by a boss, its power to give away valuable franchises or
otherwise to squander the people's inheritance can be held in check by
the requirement that upon proper demand such action shall be rendered
subject to a veto by the people at large. And if, owing to the
intricacies of party organization or to other circumstances, a
legislature is stubbornly obstructive, the initiation of legislation
by means of popular petition undeniably offers an instrument for the
overcoming of such inertia. Were it true that the control of
legislatures by private interests is on the increase, or even showing
no sign of diminution; were it true that legislation for social
betterment is making little or no headway; were it true that our
courts show no disposition to realize that a more liberal
interpretation of constitutional provisions is demanded by the changed
conditions of our time; it would probably be admitted by all except a
few irreconcilables that, however serious might be the objections to
the remedies proposed, their adoption appears to be almost dictated by
that kind of imperious necessity that knows no law.
As a matter of fact the diametrical opposite of these things is what,
upon a large survey of the state of the whole country, is unmistakably
evident. It is doubtful whether one can point anywhere to a
legislature owned as the Pennsylvania legislature used to be owned by
the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Maryland legislature by the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad, the New Hampshire legislature by the Boston and
Maine Railroad. Child labor laws and workmen's compensation laws are
being enacted and strengthened in state after state, very much after
the fashion in which the Australian ballot laws were being passed in
state after state a quarter of a century ago. And as for our courts,
the Supreme Court of the United States, once regarded as the very
stronghold of extreme constitutionalism, has been steadily setting an
example of liberal construction; while such a decision as that of the
New York Court of Appeals in the Ives case is pointed to on all hands
as being rather in the nature of a survival of a past attitude of mind
than typical of the present temper of the courts of last resort in our
leading states.
Nevertheless, enough remains, and more than enough, to constitute a
serious grievance. The progress that has been made towards the removal
of scandalous practices or exasperating impotence is not sufficient to
justify complacency. But it is sufficient to dispose of that plea of
desperate necessity to which advocates of the "rule of the people" are
so prone to resort as over-riding all other considerations. Indeed,
the state of mind of these advocates is in no small measure an
illustration of that remarkable psychological phenomenon to which
Herbert Spencer has drawn attention as marking the progress of reform
agitations--that their excitement usually becomes most intense when
the object to which they are directed has been almost attained. A
dozen years ago it might plausibly have been urged that in our
existing representative institutions effective control of public
service corporations was impossible; but the railroad-rate legislation
of the national Congress and the institution of Public Service
Commissions in state after state have been accomplished without a jar.
A few years ago it was still the fashion to speak of the United States
Constitution as virtually incapable of amendment, this belief being
based on the fact that, apart from the amendments brought about by the
Civil War, none had been adopted since the early days of the republic.
The adoption of the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments in rapid
succession has disposed of that notion for good and all; and yet it is
only now that a proposal to substitute an easy and rapid method of
amendment in place of that now provided in the Constitution has been
brought forward and urged. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that
to-day's impatience with our existing governmental system, to-day's
readiness to welcome short-cut remedies, is attributable rather to
exasperation with the difficulties and evils of yesterday than to the
conditions of to-day or the prospects of to-morrow.
Into the merits and defects of the various proposals for "direct rule
of the people" it is not the purpose of this brief paper to enter in
detail. Many valid considerations have been urged in their favor, and
many sound objections have been advanced against them. Speaking
generally, these arguments relate to the question of the honesty,
intelligence, and efficiency of legislation as it has been, or is
likely to be, affected by the change in question. Advocates of the new
order have pointed to the well-known deficiencies of our legislatures
as they are. Its opponents have given instances of errors, and of the
misleading of voters, under the initiative system. In the main,
however, since experience--in spite of Switzerland's long, but
sparing, use of the method--has as yet been but of the slightest
extent, serious writers on both sides have dwelt chiefly on the
inherent tendency of the system. That it cannot cover the whole
province of legislation both sides are fully agreed; and
objectors lay chief stress on the inevitable tendency of the
initiative-and-referendum system to reduce the importance and dignity
of legislatures and consequently to end all hope of raising the
quality of their membership, while advocates of the system set great
store by the educative value of the exercise of direct legislative
judgment upon the whole body of the citizenship.
There is, however, one consideration, and that perhaps the most vital
of all, which appears to have been strangely neglected. Every-day
efficiency, even every-day right-mindedness, is not the only thing
about which there is occasion for solicitude. It seems usually to be
forgotten on both sides of the discussion that there occur every now
and then, in the history of a nation, questions of a crucial nature
upon the right or wrong decision of which rest momentous and enduring
consequences. Such questions, under the traditions of representative
government as they have grown up in the course of ages, are fought out
in a very different way from that which marks the ordinary routine of
legislation and government. They are not settled by an instantaneous
show of hands. What may take place in England if it shall come to be
governed by a single chamber and under a closure system which makes
parliamentary obstruction impossible, no man can say; but up to the
present time nothing like this kind of unlimited rule by majority vote
in a parliamentary body has existed either in that country or in our
own. There has always been in both a possibility of resistance, in one
form or another, to the immediate desire of a majority of the people's
representatives; and this has profoundly affected the course of
history upon those matters which are of most vital moment.
The difference between questions of this type and the ordinary
subjects of every-day legislation is more than a mere difference of
degree. It is not only that they are more momentous; they are
different in kind, in that their decision involves a result which,
humanly speaking, is irreversible. Nothing is more common than to say
that if an act of the people should prove to be a mistake, they will
correct that mistake. But there are mistakes that cannot be corrected.
If the question of union or disunion had been put to the touch of a
majority vote, and had been decided in favor of disunion, the result
of that one day's voting would, in all human probability, have been a
permanent severance of this nation into two mutually alien parts.
Since the Civil War there has been one great issue which, though in a
wholly different way, quite as distinctly illustrates the irrevocable
character which the decision of a public question may have. It _might_
be no calamity for this country to live, either temporarily or
permanently, under a silver standard. But the truly vital point in the
silver question which occupied the attention of the nation for twenty
years was not that of the silver standard as such, but of the
repudiation and currency-debasement involved in substituting the
silver dollar, at the ratio of sixteen to one, for the gold dollar as
the monetary unit. Had this substitution been effected, the
repudiation and debasement would have taken place; and a subsequent
return to the gold standard would not in the slightest degree have
redressed the wrong. Under the existing system of government there was
opportunity for obstruction, for compromise, for the effective
influence of a few strong minds and a few powerful personalities.
Under the "direct rule of the people" the whole matter might have been
settled at a stroke; and it is by no means improbable that it would
have been so settled, at some stage or other of the struggle, in favor
of the silver standard. For it must be remembered that the very
existence of this possibility would have stimulated in an incalculable
degree the efforts of the silver agitators; and nothing is more
probable than that during the years of depression, distress, and
discontent that followed upon the panic of 1893, a moment would have
been found when the popular cry of "more money" would have swept the
country.
That questions not less fundamental, and the decision of which is not
less irrevocable, are destined to arise in the future it should be
unnecessary to argue. Never, in this country at least, has the
atmosphere been so charged with issues affecting the very bases of the
economic and social order. These issues are for the most part vague
and undefined, but their gravity and sweep is none the less apparent.
But if an illustration were needed of a more specific nature, and one
which relates to a question partly of the past and partly of the
future, such an illustration lies ready to hand. The agitation against
the right of private property in land which was started forty years
ago by Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" has only within the last
few years become a serious factor in practical politics. The shape
which it assumes in the actual proposals urged for immediate adoption
is that of a mere reduction of the tax now levied on buildings and the
placing of a corresponding additional tax on land. But the earnest
advocates of this step and its earnest opponents alike rest their case
on the animating purpose behind it. That purpose flows from the
conviction, which its leading advocates often find it politic to keep
in the background but which they seldom disavow, that the owners of
land have no rights which, in the eye of justice, the rest of the
community is bound to respect. The fiery zeal that shines through the
pages of "Progress and Poverty" is animated by this conviction on the
one hand, and on the other by the unhesitating belief that under the
regime of private property in land human wretchedness must continually
increase, while its abolition would carry with it the extinction of
poverty. Henry George did not balk at the word confiscation. Indeed it
is precisely the assertion of the right to confiscate land which,
apart from the eloquent and plausible presentation, constituted the
distinctive character of George's work. John Stuart Mill had long
advocated the interception by the state of the "unearned increment" of
the future, but firmly held that expropriation of landowners without
compensation is morally indefensible. Henry George, in spite of his
profound reverence for Mill, dismissed this judgment of the great
liberal economist and philosopher with undisguised contempt. After
quoting a certain passage from Mill, George exclaims:
In the name of the Prophet--figs! If the land of any country
belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and
justice, have the individuals called landowners to the rent? If
the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and
justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?
But while Henry George was convinced that outright confiscation would
be perfectly just, he proposed to accomplish the substance of
confiscation without introducing its form. "Confiscation," he said,
"would involve a needless shock to present customs and habits of
thought;" and the method he proposed for achieving his end was "to
abolish all taxation save that upon land values." But he made no
pretence whatever of there being any difference in substance between
the two things. It was of the essence of his plan that the single tax
should be tantamount to confiscation. The mere placing of the present
entire burden of taxation upon the landowners would be far from
sufficing for his purpose; and he expressly counted on what he
regarded as the inevitable and rapid growth of the land tax, when once
his principle was acknowledged, to such dimensions as to swallow up
the entire rental value of land. Not the mere expenses of government
as we are now familiar with them, but all the outlay for social and
individual betterment which the entire revenue now attaching to the
ownership of land could supply was to be available for the public
good. The idea of his program was epigrammatically, but sufficiently
accurately, conveyed in a motto that was prominent in his campaign for
mayor of New York: "No taxes at all, and a pension for everybody."
Now it requires no extraordinary effort of the fancy to imagine what
would be the natural course of such an agitation as this under a
system of government in which the idea of the direct rule of the
people had become thoroughly established; and by "thoroughly
established" we must understand, in the case of our own country, the
dominance of that idea in the nation as well as in the separate
States. If in those conditions a doctrine like that of Henry George
were put forward, and commanded the devotion of a band of earnest and
able men, the form which its propaganda would take would, in the
nature of things, be wholly different from that which we have
actually witnessed. The goal towards which all effort would be
directed would be the obtaining of a popular majority for some single
proposal, the adoption of which would insure the fulfilment of the
great purpose. The preoccupation of the nation with other issues that
divide parties or factions would be no hindrance. In order to bring
the question up for immediate decision by popular vote, all that would
be necessary would be the satisfaction of some minimum requirement
laid down in the initiative system; a minimum requirement which, be it
noted, under the principle of "direct rule," has for its only _raison
d'être_ the practical need of avoiding an intolerable multiplication
of election questions. With this minimum satisfied, the champions of
the change would advance to the charge year after year, fired with the
consciousness that the gaining of a popular majority at the very next
election would end once for all the iniquitous institution by which
mankind has been robbed of its birthright, and make poverty and
wretchedness a thing of the past.
But, it may be objected, is there after all any essential difference
between this process and that which goes on under the traditional
representative system, when it is truly representative? If the people
are really convinced that land ownership is robbery, and that they
should resume what they hold to be their own, are they not able, and
ought they not to be able, to obtain their wish through the
legislative assembly which represents them? The answer is that under
the representative system as we know it--and quite as much at its best
as at its worst--the influence of the wishes of the electorate upon
the representative body is not uniform and mechanical. Representatives
are elected not upon one issue, but upon many, and it is always a
question how definite the popular "mandate" has been upon any one of
them. From this alone it follows that there is a large, though
indefinite, region in which a representative may feel free to act
according to the dictates of his own individual judgment. In the case
of any question involving a fundamental and momentous change, it is
necessary that the mandate be extremely clear before it can be
regarded by intelligent and conscientious legislators as binding upon
them; and to accomplish this the strength of the feeling among the
people in favor of the measure must be shown in ways far more
emphatic, far more conclusive of a firm and fixed desire, than the
mere existence of a majority vote. The issue must virtually raise
itself to a prominence and intensity commensurate with its importance.
It must find its way not merely to a position in which, when people
are challenged to say yes or no, a few more say yes than say no, but
to a position in which it dominates other issues and is seen to
represent the deliberate and imperative desire of the people. And when
we add to this the constitutional checks that have thus far obtained
both in England and in this country, together with the legitimate
possibilities of parliamentary obstruction, we see how profound is the
difference between the representative system and that of direct rule.
It may almost be likened to the difference between a living organism,
endowed with the power of discrimination and judgment, and a crude
mechanical contrivance. In the one case, a great issue has to go
through an ordeal fitted to its nature; in the other, it is put into
the hopper along with the veriest trifles of every-day business, and
its fate is settled by the same monotonous turn of the wheel.
The difference which I have been endeavoring to bring out is not
identical either with the difference between conservatism and
progressiveness or the difference between carefulness and looseness in
legislation. Much has been said both for and against "direct rule" as
related to these qualities; it has been contended that direct
legislation is more conservative and less conservative, more prone to
error and less prone to error, than legislation by representative
assemblies. But what is usually held in view, on both sides, is the
course of what I have been referring to as every-day legislation.
Important, however, as the question may be in relation to such
matters, the transcendent issue involved in the question of direct
rule of the people is how it would operate in those supreme trials
which the nation is sure to be called upon in the future, as it has
been in the past, to undergo. The cardinal objection that I find to it
is not that it is radical or that it is careless, but that it is
intrinsically incapable of making that vital distinction which should
be made between these grand issues and the ordinary questions of
legislative routine. And no merely mechanical modification would
overcome this difficulty. The influences which, upon great occasions,
have been brought into play to stay the flood of immediate popular
desire perform a function for which no automatic device can serve as a
substitute. These influences are sometimes noble, as in Cleveland's
adamantine resistance to currency debasement, or in the act of the
seven Republican Senators who, at tragic cost to themselves, voted
against the conviction of Andrew Johnson; sometimes ignoble, as in the
gigantic campaign fund raised by Mark Hanna in 1896; sometimes not
specially to be marked with any moral label, but embodying the weight
naturally accorded, in any system except that of the absolute and
mechanical rule of the majority, to intellectual ability and personal
force as such. Under the system of direct rule of the people, all
possibility of such interposition would be swept away. Union or
disunion, currency debasement or currency integrity, land confiscation
or the observance of the rights of property--issues like these could
be brought before the people with the same facility as a measure
authorizing the purchase of a toll-road or defining the duties of a
sheriff; and their fate would be decided by the same simple yes or no
of the majority.
Opponents of direct rule are more or less in the habit of speaking of
it as the rule of the mob. Its advocates have no trouble in disposing
of this characterization by pointing out that the distinguishing mark
of a mob is disorder or lawlessness, while the process of taking a
vote of the people, on measures even more than on men, is eminently
orderly and regular. The phrase is open to objection; taken literally,
it cannot be defended. But in all probability what those who use it
really mean, more or less distinctly, is something very like what has
been dwelt on in this paper. What they have in mind is not the
turbulence of the mob, but its brute power, its inaccessibility to
complex considerations, its incapacity for taking counsel or modifying
its purpose, the dumb finality of its acts. A system under which the
highest questions of fundamental public policy were submitted to the
peremptory decision of a majority vote at the polls would be so
vitally different from the system of representative government as we
have known it that, allowance made for the picturesque exaggeration of
the figure, the likening of it to mob rule is by no means without
excuse.
There are of course many advocates of the initiative and referendum
who qualify their support in various ways; and, so far as that goes,
there are many opponents who admit that, within proper limitations,
these methods may be desirable. With all this I am not concerned. The
real force behind the general movement--including not only direct
legislation but also the recall of judges and the nullification of
judicial decisions by popular vote--is the dogma of the inherent
rightfulness of the unlimited rule of the majority. In the collection
of papers on the subject issued by the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, the leading place is given to a paper by Senator
Bourne, of Oregon. Of any hesitation as to the application of the
direct legislation method to the irreversible decision of fundamental
questions, he shows not the faintest trace. On the contrary, it is
precisely to questions of the highest moment, to the decision of
issues of great sweep and significance, that he regards the
application of the direct vote as peculiarly just and desirable. "It
is not proposed," he says, "that the people shall act directly in all
the intricate details of legislation." The great function of the
initiative is in the field of ideas: "Under the initiative any man can
secure the submission of his ideas to a vote of all the people,
provided eight per cent. of the people sign a petition asking that the
measure he proposes be so submitted." That any such question, so
submitted, will be decided as it should be, Senator Bourne not only
does not doubt, but apparently does not imagine that anybody else can
be so perverse as to doubt. "The people of a state will never vote
against their own interests, hence they will never vote to adopt a
law unless it proposes a change for the improvement of the general
welfare." No sign of consciousness that there may be a difference
between the interests of the majority and the interests of the whole
people, between immediate interests and permanent interests, between
apparent interests and real interests; still less of any possible
conflict between interests--as that word is commonly understood--and
the abiding principles of justice or of honor. The 300,000 are certain
to be right if the count of noses against them is but 290,000. To be
sure, no rational man can actually believe this; and there is little
doubt that Senator Bourne would repudiate such an interpretation of
his words. But there is equally little doubt as to the position he
would fall back upon. "The chief function"--this is the declaration
with which he opens his discussion--"the chief function of the
initiative and referendum is to restore the absolute sovereignty of
the people." The idea that the sovereignty of the people means
absolute and unrestricted rule over the whole people according to the
immediate will and pleasure of fifty-one per cent. of the people--a
crude error whose almost unchallenged currency among the
"progressives" of our day is one of the most remarkable psychological
phenomena of our time--lies at the bottom of the whole direct-rule
propaganda.