Page:The Wisconsin idea (IA cu31924032449252).pdf/13



to the movement for genuinely democratic popular government which Senator La Follette led to overwhelming victory in Wisconsin, that state has become literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole. Nothing is easier than to demand, on the stump, or in essays and editorials, the abolition of injustice and the securing to each man of his rights. But actually to accomplish practical and effective work along the line of such utterances is so hard that the average public man, and average public writer, have not even attempted it; and unfortunately too many of the men in public life who have seemed to attempt it have contented themselves with enacting legislation which, just because it made believe to do so much, in reality accomplished very little.

But in Wisconsin there has been a successful effort to redeem the promises by performances, and to reduce theories into practice. In consequence legislative leaders and reformers pushing legislation in other states write by the hundred to the men in power in Wisconsin asking for information on what has been done. Mr. McCarthy, the chief of the Legislative Reference Library of the Free Library Commission, has written this book primarily to answer such inquiries. His purpose is to