Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/742

 726 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

It foments and panders to class-hatred, discloses the aims of the radicals who are arrayed in favor of this pernicious innovation, and needs very few words to point a warning to those who believe in public order and honesty. In no instance have I misstated or exaggerated the utterances of those who speak for the initiative. It is easy to verify by conclusions with a volume of excerpts in exact line with those I have quoted. Here is another logical sweetmeat, also from Parsons, but quoted freely by other " refer- endum " writers :

Direct legislation tends to stability, not only by the rejection of dangerous legislation, but by offering those who deem themselves oppressed an effective remedy by trial in the open court of public opinion acting as a safety-valve for discontent.

For whose discontent? For the proselytizers, agitators, and fomenters of social discord ? For the disciples of Emma Goldman and Herr Most? Let this not be considered a wild and unfair inference. Here is one of the most conservative of the initiative advocates, a professor in one of the leading law colleges of the country, who writes and publishes :

It [the present order of things] is smothering discontent in hopelessness that breeds poison. Every anarchist I ever heard express himself had much of truth in what he said. It was his hopelessness of obtaining the justice he sought by peaceful means that made him advocate fire and bomb. An anarchist is a man who feels intensely the pressure of wrong conditions, and whose nature has more of recklessness than hope. Give us the referendum, and the path will be so plain that anarchy will soon go out of business.

Which simply means, if it has any meaning, that if anarchists may frame and pass just such laws as they like, they will become gentle and peaceful.

The assertion that an operative popular initiative, in general use throughout the American states, would tend to stability meaning, as must be understood, governmental efficiency and justice, and security of individual rights was clearly falsified by Mr. Parsons himself before he had finished his paragraph. And it is disproved by a glance at the organizations, as well as the indivuliiils, that are the most clamorous for the initiative. There is not a firebrand agitator in the land who is not demanding it. Every preacher of the gospel of might, who believes that the