Page:Address of Frederick V. Holman at Oregon Bar Association annual meeting.djvu/8

 was that while it fitted tolerably well in this one place, there were many places where it fitted before where it did not fit at all.

These theorists seem to believe that all human ills—with the possible exception of physical ones—could be done away with by amendments of Constitutions and municipal charters, and by the passage of statutes and ordinances. And thus the laws of sociology could be repealed or amended, possibly even the law of supply and demand and also the law of gravity, and thus upset gravity.

And so it came about that without changing the voters, except by numbers, as Oregon is a growing State, the people who supposed they could not govern themselves by a representative form of government, to which they were accustomed, adopted a democratic form of government, of which they knew nothing as to its workings, evidently believing that as they were incapable of electing proper representatives they were capable of enacting their laws by popular vote, and as conditions were unsatisfactory they could be bettered by upsetting the existing order.

But the result, partly at least, must be disappointing to these theorists, for the crudity of these popular amendments of the Constitution and other enactments has been such that they have been amended by the Courts—practically legislating amendments by decisions—to make these enactments workable. Fortunately, perhaps, these initiative amendments of the Constitution do not provide against their amendment by judicial decisions. And this suggests whether a further amendment to the initiative provisions of the Oregon Constitution might not be made by abolishing the Legislature and giving all legislative power to the people and to the Courts, as seems to be the case with these amendments of the Constitution.

In this address I shall call attention mainly to the enactment and amendments of charters of cities, towns, and other municipal corporations under the Oregon Constitution as amended, so as to allow the legal voters of each city and town to enact and amend its own charter, and to decisions of our