Page:Address of Frederick V. Holman at Oregon Bar Association annual meeting.djvu/7



To the man untrained in law, not alone statutory law, but the common law and the laws of sociology, it doubtless seemed very simple, sufficient and efficient to adopt and to exercise the powers under the initiative and referendum amendments of the Oregon Constitution relating to enacting laws and amending the Constitution by the legal voters of the State at large, but also by enacting and amending charters of cities, towns and other municipal corporations by their legal voters, and thus largely to do away with precedents and hasten the dawn of a political and social millennium in the body politic.

That men selected by popular vote to make up the State Legislature were often careless, somtimes stupid and occasionally venal, seemed to prove that men assembled in a legislative body were a curse instead of a blessing, and that the same men, together with the voters who had chosen them, were careful, intelligent, efficient, virtuous, capable and honest men when acting individually as law makers. Apparently these alleged reformers thought that as precedent was sometimes a bar to progress it should be done away with as far as possible. But they forgot—or more likely, as they could not forget what they never knew—they were unaware that to upset existing conditions is to create new conditions without precedents, and that the first thing to do is to establish new precedents that the new order may exist and continue. That, as was said by Herbert Spencer of similar conditions, that it was like an unskillful worker in metals who had a pot with a metal top which fitted in all places but one, and in endeavoring to make it fit in this one place struck it with a hammer, and the result