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