Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/746

 730 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

O. M. Barnes, one of the few writers who have taken the trouble to expose the danger of the initiative :

No one ever held more firmly than Jefferson to the doctrine that all governments must be limited to the exercise of just powers; and when, further on, he denounced acts of usurpation and abuse as evincing a purpose to employ " absolute despotism," he did not limit his denunciation to the acts of kings. In his messages and writings he keeps before us the superiority of a limited over an absolute government.

And again :

The citing of the Declaration of Independence in support of this plan [the initiative], as was done, is a great perversion of that instrument and injurious to Jefferson's fame. Because he wrote that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, it by no means follows that a measure is just or within the scope of rightful power, because a majority has sanctioned it. The Declaration says that all men " are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ; that, to secure these rights, governments are insti- tuted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the gov- erned." No power unjust by nature can be transformed into a just power by the consent of a majority.

The claim that Jackson was a friend of the popular initiative is based, so far as appears in the testimony, upon this passage in one of his inaugural addresses : " So far as the people can, with convenience, speak, it is safer for them to express their own will." What Andrew Jackson would say, were he alive now to speak on the proposition of government by irresponsible petitioning and popular vote, without regard to legislatures or supreme courts, may be left to the imagination.

With equal confidence these propagandists elect Abraham Lincoln as one of their own on the strength of the following quotations from his utterances: "Allow all the governed an equal voice in the government ; " " Governments of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." It is also pointed out that Lincoln, before the Civil War had been long in progress, made a proposition to the Confederate leaders to submit the differences between the North and South to the popular vote of all the states northern and southern with the agreement to abide by the result as indicated by a majority. In this manner he hoped to put an end to the war. Of course, the