tection. And it is at this very point that the initiative and referendum fails him, and makes him the victim of all the passions and prejudices of an irresponsible majority. The word irresponsible is used, not in its relation to the individual, but in relation to the sovereign majority, which is, according to the initiative and referendum, the law, and therefore, answerable to no human power. We now come to the second objection, that it seeks "to effect, in the forms of the constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system." What is it that the initiative and referendum proposes? It is that a given number, or a given per centage, of the voters shall have the power to propose certain legislation, which the congress or the state legislature, as the case may be, must put into form and enact, the same to become a law upon the approval of a majority of the voters. It is also pro posed that where the legislative body acts upon its own motion that a given number of voters may, at any time within a few months, demand an election to see whether the law thus enacted shall stand or fall. Elihu F. Barker, one of the recent writers upon the topic, tells us that " this method places the veto power in the hands of the people, the only place for it if democracy is to mean anything." Without discussing the question whether it is practicable to bring the voting population up to an understand ing of complex questions, where they are competent to pass upon the merits of laws without a trial, such for instance, as a tariff bill, we will look simply to the effect of such a provision upon the energy of the government. Bearing in mind that the test of any system is under abnormal condi tions, or in the presence of emergencies, what would be the effect of such a provis ion in the presence of war, or threatened hostilities. Suppose this government to be menaced by a foreign power, with New England, as in the case of the war of 1812,
opposed to the assertion of the power of this government in preserving its standing among the nations of the earth. Congress, we will say, enacts a bill providing for the fitting out of a navy, or for making adequate coast defences. The people of New Eng land, opposed to war, demand that the mat ter be submitted to a referendum. This suspends operation under the law until the case is tried before the people, and in the meantime the hostile power might have burned half of our coast cities and laid the country in waste. This might be the case even though every man in the nation, aside from those who demanded the referendum, was in favor of the measure. But if we consider it in reference to purely business legislation, it fails equally to meet the re quirements. Take the tariff, for instance. There are two distinct schools of thought upon this question. One of them is for a protective tariff, the other for a tariff for revenue only. If a certain percentage of the voters have a right to initiate legislation, it must be obvious to every man of intelli gence that one or the other of these schools of economics will find followers enough to demand a revision of the tariff as often as once every session of congress, and we should go on year after year without a single twelve-month of certainty as to what law, or what system of law, was to prevail in respect to the collection of revenues. This would be equally true in respect to financial matters, and in the states where it is proposed that seven per cent of the voters may set the legislative machinery in motion, we should have an endless experi ment in taxation and excise matters, not to mention the thousand and one other problems which might be projected by the complex social organization of the closing century. As Washington says, " facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion," and this must be especially true if
