The promoters of this plan have in mind legislation upon the petition of from 5 to 10 per cent of the electorate and demanding a vote of the people thereon.

Where is the community in which the signature of such a percentage of the voters could not be readily obtained to a petition praying for anything whatsoever.

It is obviously a mania with many men to append their names to petitions. In case of failure to secure the proposed legislation in the first instance, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the same people could be induced to sign again and again, thus keeping the legislative waters in a ferment and the voters spending a large part of their time going to and returning from the polls. In a little while they would balk on going altogether.

What a fertile field for political promoters and parasites! (Bosses are of course impossible in such a millenium.) What a prismatic prospect for the demagogue!

What of the personnel of the legislature, National and State? What kind of timber would offer itself to be sawn to slivers to placate a small fraction of the electorate?

What high-minded and self-respecting citizen would consent to submit to the degradation involved in the acceptance of such a position, whatever the title or the perquisites?

Would not our legislative bodies under such a system degenerate intellectually, morally, and politically? The inquiry answers itself.

This is indeed a sweeping change in our governmental system, amounting to a revolution; for under a compulsory initiative and referendum a minority of the voters, even a small minority, as previously suggested (which, of course, means a still smaller minority of the people) can compel the legislative body to enact any law they please and submit it to the electorate; whereas the majority may not want it or have the time or inclination to master its intricacies or fathom its subtle and selfish schemes.

With no opportunity given for discussion or revision either by the electorate or the legislative body, the proposed measure is enacted into law and referred to the electorate for final acceptance or rejection as the case may be.

The successors in Congress of Webster and Clay and Adams can only hop out on the so-called legislative perch and say, "Cuckoo," whenever a sufficient number of names is attached to the string that sets the mechanism in motion.

Why have any representatives whatever, if they are without representative authority?

Why not abolish the Congress and legislatures of the States, and substitute therefor automatic registering machines?

Why not, if the legislative body is stripped of discretion as well as dignity?

I am aware that the charge is made that our representatives are prone to exercise their own judgment at times instead of blindly and obediently surrendering the convictions of a lifetime to the opinions of their constituents, swept off their feet it may be by the tale of wrongs they suffer; such, for instance, as "The crime of "73," and the infallible remedy, " 16 to 1 or bust."

Perhaps the real duty of a representative to his constituents can not be better stated than in the language of Edmund Burke to the electors of Bristol. Said he:

It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitting attention; but his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your representative owes you not only his industry but his judgment, and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. You choose a representative, indeed, but when he is chosen he is not a member of Bristol, but a member of Parliament.

How applicable the words of Burke to service in the Congress of the United States.

In the old days "the mill boy of the slashes" became the leader of the masses, not their "chore boy," not their "hired man," as too many of our Members of Congress are by their constituents expected to be. If this is true to-day, what will it be to-morrow under the proposed system of direct government, together with the recall? "The mill boy of the slashes" will then become the puppet of the masses. Under such an intolerable system there can be no leadership worthy the name.

Dull mediocrity will sit in wisdom's seat and only pollywogs swim in the political pool.

A more preposterous proposition could not be imagined.
To recapitulate for a moment:

This device presupposes that those who sign the petition in the first place are fully advised as to the nature and necessity of the proposed legislation; in the second place, it precludes the opportunity for discussion or revision, either on the part of the petitioners or the lawmaking or rather law-echoing body; and, in the third place, it also presupposes that the electorate, when it comes to vote, if it has either the time or inclination to keep abreast of a tenth part of the numerous proposition presented, will give that mature consideration to each matter which the committees of Congress are only able to bestow.

Under this pernicious plan the representative bodies are reduced to impotency, while the powers of the Executive are necessarily enlarged.

From such a situation to absolutism is a step almost imperceptible, and that step has always been taken with the people as its sponsors. "Whispering she would ne'er consent-consented."

As Henry Cabot Lodge so well says:

When the representative principle has departed and only its ghost remains to haunt the Capitol, liberty has not lingered long beside its grave. The rise of the representative principle and its spread to new lands to-day marks the rise of popular government everywhere. Wherever it has been betrayed or cast down the government has reverted to despotism. When representative government has perished freedom has not long survived.

LINCOLN STOOD SQUARELY FOR THE CONSTITUTION.

The advocates of these schemes, in their excess of zeal, claim the patronage of Lincoln for their populistic program. The authentic

writings of Lincoln will be searched in vain for any semblance of censure of our frame of government or any sort of support for the proposition of an unbridled democracy.

He was devotedly attached to the Constitution and jealous of any and all attempts to encroach upon its clauses.

To it he was ever faithful, and died a martyr to it.

Notwithstanding his hatred of slavery, his reverence for the Constitution and the law was so great that he declared on more than one occasion that if a Member of Congress he would support a fugitive slave law.

Speaking of the effect of the counting of slaves in congressional and electoral representation, he said:

Now, all this is manifestly unfair; yet I do not mention it to complain of it in so far as it is already settled. It is in the Constitution, and I do not for that cause, or for any cause, propose to destroy, or alter, or disregard the Constitution. I stand to it fairly, fully, and firmly.

But it is asserted by some that his attitude with respect to the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court shows that he was in favor of some scheme of recalling the judges and judicial decisions by popular vote.

It is true he believed the decision to be erroneous, but no reasonable construction of his acts or words gives the slightest encouragement to the suggestion that he favored a change of our governmental system providing for the recall of the judiciary.

He did say, however, that he would resist it politically by voting, if in his power, for an act prohibiting slavery in United States territory, and then try to induce the court to sustain the act in a new proceeding; or, in other words, reverse itself. It is no reflection upon the judiciary that courts, even the highest, have been known to do this.

It is only by distortion that the utterances of Lincoln can be made to give the slightest moral or immoral support to the propaganda of populism.

Standing at Gettysburg at the close of the rebellion, viewing with sad eyes its picturesque slopes billowed with the countless graves of the bravest and bonniest boys of America, and seeing in his mind's eye the newly made graves of other thousands scattered all through the war-ravaged and pain-racked land, sacrificed to save the Constitution and the Government of the fathers from extinction, he closed the briefest and the greatest speech of all the ages with the words:

That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

What supreme sacrilege to say that Lincoln therein intended to repudiate or rebuke a government of law.

Has it come to be that he who declares that this is a government of law, not men, is to be proscribed as an enemy of the people?

Should not the plain people pray night and morning to be delivered from the friendship of multitudes of their professed friends? Has it come to be that an opponent of schemes to disrupt and destroy representative government shall be characterized as the enemy of the people and the friend of privilege?

If so, some of us welcome the odium such an accusation involves.

Vice President Elect Marshall proves himself worthy of the family name he bears when he says, speaking of the aphorism " Vox populi, vox Dei ":

The voice of the people is the voice of God, when the people know what they are talking about.

THE RECALL.

The next step in the program of so-called progressiveness is the recall. What of it in practice?

Under the operations of the recall Washington, whose preeminence both in war and peace is acknowledged by all, would unquestionably have been recalled from the Chief Magistracy of the Nation as a result of his unpopularity in connection with the Genet episode.

Lincoln, whose fame fills the earth and whose popularity as an American hero is unsurpassed, would certainly have shared a similar fate at the hands of the infuriate populace in 1862 and 1863.

Cleveland, "standing by like an iron wall" in 1893 against the furious assaults of his former political associates who were bent upon debauching the national currency and tarnishing the national honor, would have been ground to political powder if he could have been thrown into the hopper of the recall.

That our country has in the past escaped such catastrophes as these due to the strength and sanity of the Federal Government-should preclude the possibility of the serious consideration and exploitation of this fatuous remedy for the public ills.

Such a dose is infinitely more dangerous than the disease which it is intended to cure.

PUBLIC OFFICIALS NOT CORRUPT.

The favorite plea against the present tenure in office is that it tends to make public officials indifferent to the wishes of their constituents and careless of their honor-corrupt, in other words.

There never was a time when public officials were more responsive to the will of the people, actuated by higher motives, or freer from corrupting influences.

The truth is the rogue in office to-day is an exception so rare as to be almost a negligible factor. If he gets in at all, he can not stay long.

Observation of and association with public men at the seat of government for a decade and a half has convinced me of their integrity and induces this assertion ungrudgingly.

The public trust is rarely betrayed by public officials. Mistakes are made from time to time, but they are mistakes of head, not of heart.

The morale of men in public life was never higher in any land or any age than it is in the United States of America at the present time.

On the other hand, under the proposed system, founded as it is on distrust and conducted on suspicion, a public official is robbed of every ounce of independence, every atom of courage, as well as every incentive toward efficiency.

The man of action and decision, if one can be found who will consent to such ignoble servitude, is converted into an angleworm.

THE SAME OLD FOES IN THE SAME OLD CLOTHES.

I am aware that it is all the rage nowadays to treat with contempt the lessons of the past.

Because the Greeks and Romans failed to solve the problem of selfgovernment under a socialistic democracy, why should we," the heirs of all the ages" (and the melting pot of all the nations), hesitate to make the experiment?

This is exactly the comment made by the people of other nations who have traveled the same road and shared the same fate.

Greece, it is true, was so small that it has been called a "turnip patch"; and ancient Athens, in its palmiest days, was smaller in size than Denver; nevertheless, if you and I had walked the streets of Athens in the days of Pericles, in addition to him, we should have seen in the flesh the figures of Heroditus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Hippocrates, Democritus, Amaxagoras, Āristophanes, Phydias, and Socrates.

It is no exaggeration to say that Athens alone in a single century produced more illustrious men than all the centuries and all the countries.

This being the case, may I suggest this age of "gallop and gulp" can well afford to pause at the bier of this wonderful civilization and profit by its experiences.

Aeschylus and Aristophanes were preachers of righteousness to the Athenians hastening from the uplands of law to the abyss of anarchy. But Athens stopped her ears to their message. Then Socrates came, alas, too late to save the situation, for the descent to Avernus was proceeding at accelerating pace.

Plato, the pupil of Socrates, undertook to systematize the teachings of his master, and Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, placed the teachings of both on scientific foundations, declaring, as he did, that "Men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution, for it is their salvation."

Aristotle reviewed 158 constitutions, and tells us of the political situation in Athens under a socialistic democracy. Here, if anywhere in the golden age of civilization and culture, a socialistic democracy would thrive, but not so.

They had the proposed populistic remedies which are advocated to-day, including the recall.

The Athenians named their generals by popular vote and recalled them in the same way.

If a military leader failed to meet popular expectation, even though confronted with unforeseen and insurmountable obstacles, a popular election would be called and the general would be recalled. They recalled Aristides the Just. They recalled Alcibiades, Thucydides, and Pericles.

On one occasion they dispatched a general into Sicily to conduct a military campaign, but before he arrived at his destination he was recalled.

They paid their best friend and wisest philosopher, Socrates, in poison.

O, yes! ""Tis a schoolboy's tale!" If only men and nations would profit thereby!