Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/751

POPULAR INITIATIVE 735 tion, it requires a petition of 30,000 voters, or a demand of eight of the cantons.

Among the many reforms that have been effected in the republic during the last half-century, as claimed by the initiative advocates, are the public ownership of the liquor business, the manufacture of distilled liquors being a national monopoly; the institution of state life-insurance; a greatly improved factory act; a law for local option as to capital punishment—by states; a law forbidding compulsory vaccination; a law providing for religious instruction in schools; the national ownership of railways, telegraphs, and telephones; etc. It is also claimed that there has been no civil war during these years.

As to these laws, we have in America state option as to capital punishment, the same as in Switzerland; we have in most states adequate factory laws; and, as to the liquor business, how many people in America are anxious for our national government to engage in the manufacture and sale of distilled liquors as a monopoly? How many desire the repeal of our compulsory vaccination law? Is it probable that a majority of the voters of the nation desire the national ownership of railways, telegraphs, and telephones? There is, to be sure, loud agitation for them in certain industrial centers, and it is in these same centers where the movement for the popular initiative is most active.

Admitting that most of these measures, as well as many others adopted during the last half or three-quarters of a century in Switzerland, are real reforms, it does not appear that all have been brought about through the agency of the initiative, and it seems preposterous to suppose that no advance would have been made in the republic without the initiative. There were political turmoil and much corruption of legislatures there a half-century ago. There is comparative honesty in their legislative councils now. But are the reforms instituted in Switzerland during these years of greater importance or beneficence than those effected in England during the same time by reform measures without the initiative? Political corruption was rife in France under the last empire; it is generally recognized that there is less of it now, and greater national security; but they have had no popular initiative.