Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/745

 POPULAR INITIATIVE 729

claims and representations as to what benefits and reforms the popular initiative would work in this country are entirely specu- lative, except as it may be judged by the result of the law since it was generally adopted in Switzerland some fifteen years ago. In fact, this is practically admitted by the writer of Political Egypt, and the Way Out, who says :

How do we know that direct legislation will do what is claimed for it? By what it has done in Switzerland, once corrupt, but today the model republic of the Old World. The only country in Europe from which one does not hear continual stories of strikes, panics, and lockouts, and in which the lobby has been destroyed and men are re-elected to office term after term regardless of their party because of their being able men.

This was also asserted in substance by J. W. Sullivan, who was one of the first Americans to make an examination of the Swiss referendum and initiative, and who has been one of the most uncompromising advocates of it. Mr. Eltweed Pomeroy, presi- dent of the National Direct Legislation League, who edits a periodical, published in Philadelphia, devoted to the subject, bases most of his arguments upon assertions of the beneficent results in the various Swiss cantons, and, like its other advocates, jumps directly to the conclusion that it is equally applicable in the United States, and would work even greater wonders here.

Before examining into the question of the Swiss initiative, some attention should be given to the high authorities among American statesmen, politicians, and literary men who are audaciously quoted by the writers on the popular initiative as present champions or past advocates of it. Through quotation- jugglery and far-fetched inference, they implicate Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and many others of less note ; but upon clearer examination it is found that there is very little in their writings to warrant the assumption that they ever did or ever would subscribe to the system that strikes at the principle of representative government. Jefferson, as everyone knows, was a champion of democracy, but it is equally as well known that he set limits upon democracy, and that, while he was opposed to some principles of. the national constitution, he was nevertheless a strong believer in constitu- tional guarantees. To quote from The Popular Initiative, by