people was lost, because no one thought of any way in which it could be retained. But now that we have a plan whereby the direct vote can be taken without an assembly of the people, it is possible to go back to the original American system of actual popular sovereignty.

From the standpoint of principle, no government is American unless it is a government by and for the people; and no government can be a government by and for the people where the will of a small body of so-called representatives can override or disregard the will of the people. Therefore, no government can be American without the Referendum by vote in assembly or by vote at the polls, as the circumstances may require.

The town of Brookline, Massachusetts, has been for two hundred years under the town-meeting. It has an uninterrupted history of clean government from the beginning. The town has now about twenty-four thousand inhabitants. It is the richest town in the world and the bestgoverned municipality in New England. Q. Is the New England town-meeting adapted to city government?

A. No, it is not. The large number of voters in the city precludes direct action in assembly, and for that very reason it is necessary to adopt the Referendum in order that the voters in the cities may have the same right as the voters of a town to direct and definite expression of their will in regard to any specific measure in relation to which they choose to

act.

Q. Has it been successfully applied in government other than that of towns and cities?

A. The Referendum has been successfully applied in making and amending our state constitutions in every state of the Union but one; has been recently adopted in respect to legislative enactments in four states; and in Switzerland for many years, both in the cantons and in the republic or the national government, the Referendum has been in active operation, with the result that the gov

ernment has been administered in the interests of the people. No corrupt lobbies or privileged interests have been able to thwart the will of the people or to oppress and plunder the citizens, as do the trusts and the public-service companies with us. The success of the Referendum has been so pronounced that there is no serious opposition to it in the republic. It, with the Initiative, has kept the government in the hands of the people.

In addition it has been used and extensively used by the trades-unions, with memberships running into the hundreds of thousands and scattered all over the country, and it has been very successful there. Some trades-unions use this as the sole method of administering their affairs.

Q. Has it proved confusing or difficult of employment in the cantons and the republic of Switzerland?

A. No, the Referendum has not proved confusing or difficult, but has had precisely the contrary effect. It has produced a great simplification of politics and elections by separating men and measures and permitting a direct expression upon each measure by itself disentangled from all personal and party considerations and free from all questions of policy in respect to other measures.

It has produced a great simplification of the Swiss laws. Because these laws must be understood by the people they are short, simple and easily understood, whereas ours are complex, lengthy, ambiguous and hard to understand, and we have to employ an enormous number of lawyers, judges and officials to tell us what the laws mean, and they do not always know.

Q. Has it made frequent elections necessary, thus greatly increasing the cost? A. Instead of making elections more frequent and thus increasing taxation, the experience of the Swiss is the reverse. It is not worth while for politicians to attempt to squander the people's resources or for private interests to bribe them to do so when the people have it in

their power, upon petition of a small minority, to submit any measure passed by a legislature to a direct vote of the people and veto it if a majority so votes. This removes from the legislators the temptation to corruption.

The Governor of South Dakota, a year or two after the constitutional DirectLegislation amendment went into effect, said: "Since this Referendum law went into effect we have had no charter-mongers or railway speculators, no wild-cat schemes submitted to our legislature. Formerly our time was occupied by speculative schemes of one kind or another, but since the Referendum has been made a part of the constitution these people do not press their schemes, and hence there is no necessity for having recourse to the Referendum.'

Q. Does it take from the people's representatives any just rights that belong to them, or in any way limit their legitimate exercise of power?

A. The Referendum takes from the people's representatives no power that justly belongs to them. The legislators are the agents and servants of the people, not their masters. No true representative has a right or a desire to do anything his principal does not wish to have done, or to refuse to do anything his principal desires to have done. The Referendum merely prevents the representatives from becoming mis-representatives by doing, through ignorance or dereliction, what the people do not want, or neglecting to do what the people do want.

A legislative body may depart from the people's will because it does not know what the people's will is, or because the pressure of private or personal interest, contrary to the public interest, overcomes the legislators' allegiance to the people's will. In either case the Referendum is the remedy and the only complete remedy; the only means whereby real government by the people may be made continuous and effective.

Q. Does it destroy "all the safeguards of debate and discussion, of deliberate

action, of amendment or compromise"? A. No. The advantages of the present legislative system,—its compactness, experience, power of work, etc., are retained with the Referendum, but the evils of the present system,-its haste, complexity, corruption and violations of the will of the people, are eliminated.

Under the Referendum the city or state has its body of legal experts, trained advisers, and experienced legislators, of course, and they continue to do most of the law-making, but their power to do wrong or stop progress, their power to do as they please in spite of the people is removed. The state that adopts the Referendum has the service of its legislators, without being subject to their mastery. If the representatives act as the people wish, their action is not disturbed. If they act against the people's wish, the people have a prompt and effective veto by which they can stop a departure from their will before any damage is done. This is a much-needed safeguard of popular institutions.

The Referendum raises the legislators to their old position of councillors or advisers to the people and places them above suspicion, because they cannot sell out. It also gives them an independence they do not now have.

Q. Would it promote "legislative anarchy"?

A. No, but it would defeat the "legislative anarchy" now produced by the pressure of corporate interests upon the people's legislative bodies. The real anarchists are not the people, but those who seek by fraud and corruption to defeat the will of the people.

Q. Under its employment might we, as a United States Senator recently asserted, "easily find ourselves in a position where the mob of a single large city would dominate legislation, and laws would be thrust upon us ruinous to the state itself and to the best interests of the entire people of the state"?

A. No, unless the majority of the people constitute such a mob. If the mass

of the people were unfit for free government, the Referendum or any form of government that would give effect to the people's will would be a mistake the time for a republic or democracy in that community would not yet have arrived. If, however, we are right in establishing free institutions in this country and adopting government by the people as the foundation of our political structure, then let us have real government by the people and not a sham republic; representatives held in effective obedience to the people's will, and not simply the periodic selection of a new set of masters.

Q. Would legislators be expected to oppose the Referendum?

A. No reason exists why any honest legislator should oppose it. But legislators who put the interest of corporations or other private interest above the public interest might naturally be expected to oppose the Referendum.

A certain class of legislators naturally oppose the Referendum because it diminishes their personal power and their ability to accomplish any private or corporate purpose which might be more or less questionable from the standpoint of public interest.

All legislators who have been corrupted or who desire to be corrupted by publicservice corporations and privileged wealth will oppose the Referendum. All legislators who are looking for graft and who are ready to sell out or betray their constituents will oppose the Referendum, for it takes from them the power to effectively rob the people and sacrifice the interests of the public for private gain or the power and place that corrupt wealth is ever ready to aid its own tools in securing. These false or mis-representatives of the people and persons who do not believe in a popular or truly democratic government are opposed to the Referendum.

Q. Why do enlightened and publicspirited legislators of all parties favor the Referendum?

A. Enlightened and public-spirited legislators, without regard to party, favor

the Referendum because they know it will place the heel of public interest upon the neck of private graft.

The best class of legislators everywhere favor the Referendum without regard to party, because they believe the people's will should govern, and even on personal grounds, they have no objection to it, because they know that the power it takes from them is an unjust power, and that the new dignity and consideration it confers on able and honest representatives, as the people's legislative experts and broad-minded statesmen free from all suspicion of corrupt or private motive, is worth far more than the loss of consideration of corporate and private interests that may be adversely affected by the Referendum.

Q. Is the Referendum democratic in theory, fact and spirit, or "subversive of and inimical to popular government,” as affirmed by some of those who oppose the Referendum?

A. No, it is government by final vote of so-called representatives, without the check of the Referendum, that is subversive of and inimical to popular government. Since democracy means the rule of the people by themselves, nothing can be more democratic than that measure which would give the people an opportunity to speak directly and legislate directly whenever they cared to do so.

The Referendum is the soul of democratic government and of popular sovereignty.

Not only is the Referendum ideally democratic, but it is the most formidable weapon at the command of the people to prevent the overthrow of democratic government by political machines controlled by privileged wealth.

The Referendum is democratic in fact and spirit because it reënthrones the people themselves in the exercise of a power that was always theirs, with which they ought never to have parted-the power to pass direct judgment upon any given proposition, legislative act or measure. Such a power in the people them

selves, exercised to promote the interests of the mass and to destroy the special privileges and private monopolies of the classes, can never be subversive of or inimical to popular government. The Referendum is the very quintessence of popular government.

Q. Why was not the Referendum more generally employed during the early days of our government?

A. It was generally used in the early days. In fact it was for a long time the only form of government in use among our Puritan fathers. The legislative function was exercised by the whole body of enfranchised citizens. All laws were either adopted by direct vote or were subject to veto by direct vote. Later, when representative government was established, there was no powerful privileged class seeking to maintain and increase its special privileges. Hence our fathers did not appreciate the peril of privilege or class aggression that might arise and in time subvert and virtually defeat the ends of popular rule. Industry was not so organized in the early days as to afford any such opportunities as exist to-day for robbing the people by means of unjust legislation, and the incentive for the corruption of legislators by private interests was only a fraction of what it is now. Changed conditions now call for changes in methods of government which will best preserve the vital essence of democratic rule.

Switzerland was the first free government to realize that the maintenance of free institutions depended on guarding representative government from the encroachments of class interests or privilege. Her statesmen therefore framed ideal measures in the Initiative and Referendum by which the government has been kept in the hands of the people and through which the great temptations that assail the unprotected legislator have been removed by the people reserving the right to refuse to be robbed or be

trayed by corrupted or false servants. Q. Why is it imperatively demanded to-day?

A. The Referendum is imperatively demanded because there has arisen in our midst in recent years a powerful plutocracy composed of the great publicservice magnates, the trust chieftains and other princes of privilege who have succeeded in placing in positions 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 moneycontrolled machines, incorruptible legislators and officials are driven into retirement and their places filled with creatures beholden to corporate wealth and monopoly interests. In this manner the government has become largely a government of privileged wealth, for privileged interests, by the lawlessness of the privileged ones and their tools, with the result that the people are continually exploited and corruption is steadily spreading throughout all the ramifications of political life. 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.

The Referendum is the surest and swiftest method of checking the aggressions of the great corporate interests that have captured our legislative bodies, from city council to national Congress. It is the fundamental reform before the American people. It is the doorway of progress, the great hope of democracy and good government, the doom of the boss and the machine and of the corporations that want government by the few instead of by the people.

racy, is the subject of our book-study this month, is one of a group of fundamental thinkers and incorruptible statesmen and publicists who are the chief dependence of free institutions. They are happily coming to the front on every hand, springing into the breach, as it were, in the hour of democracy's supreme peril.

When Mr. Tom L. Johnson was elected Mayor of Cleveland, Mr. Howe was one of the strongest and ablest Republicans members of the city government. Cleveland's new mayor explained his reasons for advocating the reduction of car-fares, the ultimate acquisition of the street-railway service and other public utilities by the city, and also his reasons for other reforms which antagonized privileged interests but which would make for the happiness and prosperity of the citizens and the purity and efficiency of the municipal government. The reasons advanced, though running directly counter to many views which he had previously entertained, impressed Mr. Howe as worthy of serious consideration and investigation. The more he considered the question, the more he became satisfied that they would unquestionably tend to benefit and advance the interests of the people though they would arouse the relentless opposition of the almost invincible public-service corporations that were coining millions of dollars that should have gone to the city-corporations that were corrupting civic life in order to perpetuate their hold on the wealth and the rights of the people.

To throw his influence in with the Mayor would inevitably excite the bitter opposition on the part of the machine organization of his own party and the great privileged interests. Moreover, Mr. Howe had unconsciously, as have millions of American citizens, become imbued with the reactionary distrust of democracy which the great corporations and

that he might arrive at the bed-rock truths. So he set to work to exhaustively investigate the questions involved, and the more deeply he studied the situation the more clearly he saw how pitifully superficial and essentially false had been the explanations accounting for the prevalence of corruption and graft and for the failure of free government in our cities, which interested parties had advanced and which had been taken up and echoed by multitudes of well-meaning people. Clearly the tap-root of corruption lay, not in the people, but in the so-called leaders of the business interests who, attracted by the rich prizes of public franchises-veritable gold mines whose output of riches must ever increase became the sustainers when not the creators of corrupt bosses and who furnished the campaignfunds to make invincible the controlled machines through which politics was reduced to a system in which the minions and servants of privilege were everywhere placed on guard to render possible the betrayal of the interests of the great people whom they were supposed faithfully to serve.

The more Mr. Howe investigated the great problems of the city, the more he found that instead of democracy being at fault, the failure and the corruption were due to privileged and class interests that were polluting the fountain-head of free government. Then for the first time he realized the profound significance of the truth of De Tocqueville's utterance, that "the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy."

In tracing the evolution that marks his political life after he began to search for the foundation secrets of corruption in public life and the shortcomings of American municipal government, Mr. Howe says:

"Starting with the conviction that our evils were traceable to personal causes, to the ab