Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/209

 legislature home rule, the initiative and referendum and the recall.

Perhaps it was not such a little platform after all, but big indeed, I think, when one comes to consider its potentialities, and if anyone thinks it was easy to put its principles into practice, let him try it and see! It was drawn by that Johnson Thurston of whom I spoke, and by Oren Dunham and by Elisha B. Southard and others, citizens devoted to their town, and already with a prescience of the city spirit. They succeeded in compressing into those few lines all we know or need to know about municipal government, and ages hence our cities will still be falling short of the ideal they expressed on that little card. There were many who went with us in that first campaign who did not see all the implications of that statement of principles; none of us saw all of them of course. The movement had not only the strength but the weaknesses of all so-called reform movements in their initial stages. Those who were disappointed or disaffected or dissatisfied for personal reasons with the old party machines, no doubt found an opportunity for expression of their not too lofty sentiments, although later on when they saw that it was merely a tendency toward democracy they fell away, not because the movement had deserted its original ideals but because they at last understood them.

As I now look back on that first campaign, on the experience I had so much dreaded, the perspective has worked its magic, and the hardships and difficulties have faded away, even, I hope, as its en