Page:The Atlantic Monthly, volume 97.djvu/806

792 and the Book of Common Prayer on Sundays, and, God be thanked, a few congenial spirits with whom he can quarrel in an amicable way, more by token that my friend from Massachusetts tells me she has no present intention of returning to that bleak Puritan region, in which, by some strange perversity in the ordering of things, she appears to have been born. Again I offer her my humble homage, and again Mr. Thackeray's lines come into my head, with their quaint and fascinating picture of reminiscent content:

Gillian's dead, God rest her bier. Marian 's married, but I sit here, Alone and merry at sixty year, Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.

equal-suffrage referendum which is to be taken in Oregon this month, together with several others of minor importance, has an interest wholly independent of the question immediately at issue. That has been so fully discussed of late years that there is little new to be said on either side. In Oregon it was thoroughly threshed out six years ago, when an equal-suffrage amendment to the state constitution was submitted to the people in the old method, and was defeated at the polls.

But the Oregon referendum derives special significance from the fact that it is the first attempt in American political history to amend the constitution of a state by the direct initiative of the people, and without any intervention by the legislature. It is no new thing to apply the principle of the referendum to state and local questions. The submission of any constitutional amendment to ratification or rejection by the people is itself a referendum. But the new process in Oregon is unique in this: that the initiative is not in the legislature, but with the people. Hitherto, if one principle more than another has found universal acceptance, it is that the fundamental law of the nation and of the states should be secure against abrupt and ill-considered change. In the state of Oregon itself, prior to the adoption of the initiative-referendum amendment to the constitution in 1902, time and deliberation were required for amending the constitution. When a resolution proposing an amendment was introduced in a legislature, it was referred to a com^ mittee. Hearings were had upon it, and the proposal was fully discussed in all its bearings, first in the committee, and later in each branch of the legislature. When it came before the legislature for action, it was defeated unless it received the votes of a majority of each house, and this not merely a majority of those voting, but of all the members elected. If it passed this ordeal, it must be approved by similar majorities in the next legislature before it was sent to the people. There were other checks upon hasty action. Only two amendments could be submitted to the people at any given election. For ratification, it was required that an amendment should receive a majority, not alone of the votes cast upon the proposition, but of the electors voting at the election. At the election in 1900, the vote on the equalsuffrage amendment was: affirmative, 26,265; negative, 28,402. But if these figures had been reversed, the amendment would have been defeated notwithstanding: for the number of votes cast for justice of the Supreme Court at the same election was 81,950. The ratification of