Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/732

 716 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

For nearly twenty years after the founding of Plymouth Colony, in what is now Massachusetts, the law-making was done in primary assembly of the freemen every quarter, and when the colony grew so large that it was difficult for the people to meet in this way four times a year, it was provided that every town should elect two delegates to join the bench in enacting all such ordinances as should be judged good and wholesome, and that the whole body of citizens should meet once a year to have a general oversight of the doings of the delegates, repeal any of their acts that were deemed prejudicial to the whole, and pass such new measures as might be needful in the judgment of the people. That was the referendum almost as it is advocated today.

In another place this author says :

The change from legislation by the people to legislation by final vote of a body of representatives chosen for a specific term was a transformation fraught

with the most momentous consequences The representatives can and do

make and put in force many laws the people do not desire, and they neglect or refuse to make some laws the people do desire. Between elections the sover- eign power of controlling legislation is not in the hands of the people, but in the hands of a small body of men called representatives. It appears, therefore, that the changes from legislation by the voters in person to legislation by delegates was a change from a real democracy to an elective democracy. It was a change in which self-government was fettered, and the soul of liberty was lost. This is not a government by the people, but a government by an aristocracy of office-holders.

All of the writers consulted who advocate " direct legislation " express themselves in similar terms. These enthusiasts shut their eyes to the vast change both in numbers and character of popu- lation in the United States since the colonial period. Not one of them takes any note of the fact, which has been demonstrated so often and completely that practically no one can be found to dispute it, that a system of law-making in popular assembly answering well the requirements of primitive or small rural communities fails miserably wherever the population is dense and heterogeneous ; that in every city in the country it has either been abandoned, or has become the source or cause of the very worst feature of political corruption. In large towns and cities the sys- tem has invariably been seized upon by political pirates as a means of defeating the will of the citizens and of robbing the taxpayers.

While the initiative protagonists nowhere acknowledge this, they seem to realize its truth, and seek to adapt the town-meeting system to great and often turbulent populations by substituting