cities we compel the owners of abutting property to pay a greater or less portion of the cost of paving. According to the theory of those who advocate the referendum, this decision, no matter how unjustly it dis tributed the burden of the improvement, would be final. Under the constitutional theory the courts would step in and say that this was taking private property for public purposes without just compensation, and without due process of law (Norwood v. Barker, 172 U. S. 269), and the statute would be declared null and void. In other words, under our constitutional system we agree among ourselves upon the principles which shall limit and govern legislation; we make these stipulations in the abstract, when we have no immediate interest to warp and distort our judgment and our convictions as to what is right and wrong, and then we institute the judiciary to determine when we have overreached these limitations. For my own part, realizing, perhaps, as keenly as Mr. Pomeroy the abuses which have, through a false system of education and an abuse of the privileges of corporate powers, grown up in this country, I prefer the system which permits of a judicial review of legislation to that which subjects the individual to the arbitrary will of the majority, liable at all times to be misled by prejudice, passion, self-interest or mistaken philanthropy. I say this in no disparagement of the masses, of the great unwashed, nor of any other classification of citizens. I realize fully the dangers of con centrated wealth, the advantages which it has been able to command in legislative halls and in executive chambers, and the wrongs which the masses have suffered; I have never been out of the ranks of the common people, as measured by the dollar standard, nor have I any ambition in that direction, but I am opposed to the initiative and referendum, because, in my judgment, it offers no relief to the masses, and increases the power of selfish interests by fostering a
warfare among those who ought to stand unitedly for the preservation of those rights which our constitutional systems were in tended to secure. That the initiative and referendum is a cum bersome and unscientific method of dealing with public business will be admitted by every one who is disposed to be fair, and in order to justify its adoption the friends of the measure are forced to admit that in the comparatively simple task of selecting from among their friends and neighbors honest men to represent them, the people have made such an absolute failure of popular government that it is necessary largely to increase the expenditure of time, money and resources in order to preserve their rights. If this hypothesis is true, what are we to expect from a government in which the people are to participate directly in the more complicated problem of sifting out from the mass of suggestions the wise, just and humane subjects of legislation? If we have reached a point where the people are so corrupt and venal that there are none among them who can be trusted with the responsi bilities of representing their neighbors in the public concerns of the State and nation, then it were wiser that we admit that the experi ment of the American republic is a failure, and that we drift resistless into the more economical form of monarchical government. But this proposition is not true; the men who represent us in our legislative bodies are fair exponents of the degree of political intelligence, honesty and worth manifest in their respective communities. They may be said to be the epitome of the active civic virtue of their several districts, and the evils which we are called upon to suffer are the results, not of the particular machinery of legislation, but of "the decency that is languid and the respectability that is in different," to quote the picturesque language of Dr. Parkhurst. A mere change in the method qf doing business will not change mankind; the difficulty is deeper than that,
