erendums previously, and the initiative was not adopted in national matters till 1891. Zurich was the first to adopt it in a complete form in 1867. Since the '60s it has been continually extending to hitherto unoccupied fields of government. The city of Geneva only adopted a partial form within the last two or three years. Often at first it was tried tentatively regarding a few things, but ever its scope has been extended wider and wider, and the laws regulating it have been made stricter. Thus the movement is from the optional referendum under which a petition for its submission is required before any law is submitted to a vote, to the obligatory referendum, under which all laws must be submitted to the people. Berne and Zurich have had this obligatory referendum for a score of years, and other cantons have had it regarding certain laws. We have the obligatory referendum in the United States regarding all constitutional amendments. It has been stated of Switzerland that no law relative to direct legislation has been amended or repealed without placing a stronger one in its place.

Nowhere is to be seen a sign of wavering in this majestic progress toward a pure democracy. It is universally accepted and used. No public man even suggests its abolishment. It is beyond discussion among the Swiss, just as the New England town meeting is beyond discussion in New England. Often it is hard to find any arguments for or against it in Swiss papers. It is accepted as a matter of course, just as we accept the air we breathe. Only when they come into contact with foreign opinions, do they argue or explain it.

What has it done for them? It has made of the most heterogenous group of races, languages, religions, governments on the earth's surface, a homogeneous group, a nation. It has done it within less than half a century. Swiss citizens could not now be hired as foreign mercenaries. It has made them a nation without an army in the midst of the armed camp of Europe, where potentates and peoples are land hungry. They dare not try to annex any part of Switzerland because the people in that part simply would not be annexed. Yet Switzerland has a citizen militia trained in the use of arms which each male must own, led by officers

of their own choosing, capable of a speedy concentration for defense, but almost incapable of being gotten together for an offensive campaign. And this army leaders of armies ten times its size would hesitate to attack when the Swiss were defending their homes.

It has made of them a nation which spends less per capita on the army and more on education than any European nation. In Switzerland there are no millionaires and no paupers. From it there is practically no emigration, though from surrounding countries, similar in race and language, the emigration is large. In fact, there is a troublesome immigration into Switzerland from Italy, Austria and France, because the economic conditions of the worker are so much better.

Though there was governmental corruption before direct legislation was adopted, that is now a thing of the past, and while other nations are travailing with stupendous dishonesties and scandals, Credit Mobiliers and Panama schemes and neglecting the swiftly enlarging problems of our times, Switzerland is meeting these and settling them in a careful, thorough, conservative manner. Direct legislation has proven there the foundation for progress.

While the world tendency is to centralize our governmental and other powers, direct legislation has produced the opposite action in Switzerland. It has forced a decentralization of power and has fostered a healthy local independence of feeling and a desire that each canton, city and commune should attend to its own affairs as much as possible. By remitting to localities as much as possible all local affairs, it has obviated an unseemly clashing between authorities, and yet when the nation has spoken out, that voice has been almost universally accepted as decisive.

By referring to each locality its own affairs, it has settled most of the violent clashings of labor and capital. An employer knows that if he is unjust to his men they can and will retaliate in voting. Its labor laws are in advance of the world, as its educational system is one of the finest.

This decentralization of political power fosters experiments in governmental methods aiding to a final wise decision. Each

canton is a laboratory of political experimentation. It has interested so many honored men and women in the art of government that a large share of the governmental supervision is voluntary, unpaid and of the highest grade. In fact, it has made so high a grade of government that the rudiments of a slowly evolving international government are being centered in Berne, its capital. Such things as the International Postal Union, the International Red Cross Society have their headquarters there.

The opinions of eminent citizens, senators, ex-presidents, professors, clergymen, foreign observers could be cited almost without number in support of this brief resume. Whoever says direct legislation is impracticable must simply be ignorant of the conditions and history of Switzerland, and also ignorant of what has been done elsewhere.

The third and final class of objections to direct legislation is that in order to have perfect freedom we should do away with all laws, that man should be governed entirely from the inside, that when we have reformed the individual man and made all his motives pure and honorable, we will then need no laws, but each will be a law unto himself, that we have far too many laws at present.

There is temporarily a partial truth in this. At present we do have far too many laws. Scientists tell us that the lower down we go in the scale of living creatures, the larger is the birth rate, the greater the productivity and, of course, the greater the death rate, and the higher we go the less the productivity. In the last United States Congress 24,000 measures were introduced; at the winter sessions of the Swiss Federal Congress of 1896-97 65 measures were introduced and 25 passed. The New York Legislature of 1897 passed 747 laws, and for the twelve years from 1874 to 1885 it passed 6,424 laws, or an average of 535 laws a year. The cantons of Berne and Zurich in Switzerland, during the last twenty years, have each passed less than one hundred laws, or an average of less than five laws a year. The one is the vast productivity of a low organism whose offspring are weak and most of them useless and destroyed. The other is the high organism whose offspring

are few, highly developed and most of them live. Certain fish breed by millions, and if their spawn were not easily destroyed, so that only a few out of a million live to maturity, the world would be filled with them. Our ever increasing law libraries are the graveyard of this enormous spawn of largely useless laws, which few even ever look at. An elephant has but one young once in a large number of years, but their young usually live to maturity and for hundreds of

years.

Another result of this great spawn of laws is clearly stated by the Scientific American. "There are now in this 'model republic' not less than 90,000 professional lawyers, or one lawyer to every 800 of the population. In the great cities the ratio of lawyers to other folk is still greater. In Chicago, for example, a recently compiled directory of lawyers shows that nearly 5,000 lawyers are struggling for existence, or one lawyer to every 350 inhabitants. In half a dozen other American cities, the ratio of lawyers to laymen is about the same. In other civilized countries the proportion of possible clients is much smaller. France, with a population of 40,000,000 people, has only 6,000 lawyers 1,000 less than Chicago-a ratio of less than one to 5,000. Germany, with more than 45,000,000 population, has- but 7,000 lawyers-one to about 6,500. In Great Britain the proportion of lawyers to other folk is about the same. * * * The consequence is a steadily increasing annual deluge of underdone lawyers cast upon the barren shore of a congested profession to struggle for existence in 'ways that are dark and tricks that' are the reverse of elevating to American manhood." These lawyers are the parasites that feed on this enormous fecundity of laws which our low social organism spawns out yearly. Make the laws fewer, shorter, simpler, as Swiss laws are, and a very large proportion of these useless lawyers would go into work which is really socially productive.

The anarchist and I will agree that at least three-fourths and perhaps more of our laws are useless and often worse. He is temporarily partially right. But when he says that all laws should be abolished, he is wrong. Laws are the expression of the social consciousness and will and proper laws

are the discovery of the method of social growth. They are not when fit and proper, limitations on freedom, but a broadening of the capabilities of free action. They do not as much limit as they enlarge our freedom.

We should aim to get above the law and not do without it, save as we do not need it. As we do that we will find it a potent condition by which newer and finer and larger freedoms are opened to us. For instance, I suppose every reader of this article is above the law against murder, we have no desire to murder. As far as our desires are concerned, there might as well be no law against murder. It does not limit our personal freedom. But there are still some few who desire to murder and who are restrained by the law which thus prevents them from murdering us and others. It does limit their freedom to murder others in the interests of social order. These murderous men are in a very small minority. For the vast majority, the law against murder is no limitation on our personal freedom from the inside-we are above it—but it does give us the outside freedom of not being murdered. It enlarges our freedom by this immunity. The same is true of every proper law passed. It enlarges the freedom of the lawabiding, who are the great majority in any community and the progressive part.

Our higher development is conditioned by our environment and proper laws create an orderly environment, so that higher de

velopment can be made. Thus while we would agree with the anarchist that a large part of our laws at present are the fecundity of a low social organism and should be repealed, yet there we part company. Fit laws are the voicing by the awakening social consciousness and will of the everlasting but just man-perceived method of social growth. The framing and enactment of them demands the greatest care, judgment and insight as one of the highest, if not the highest, social functions. When enacted, they should be revered and obeyed till changed in the same careful manner. Direct legislation provides this deliberation, care and insight better than any other system and that the laws shall really voice the will of the people.

This article does not attempt to state the advantages of direct legislation; previous articles have done that. And it ends this series, which has been an attempt to advocate direct legislation from the principal standpoints pertinent to our time and people. But the series have not exhausted the arguments for direct legislation. As time goes on, they will become clearer and clearer to our people in the writer's opinion, till the weight of this public opinion will force its adoption here, and shortly after we will accept direct legislation as a matter of course and wonder why we did not use it long ago.

ROBERT TYSON.

I gladly avail myself of Mr. Pomeroy's cordial permission to add to his excellent work a supplemental chapter on Proportional Representation, treating this reform as a valuable, and, indeed, necessary corollary or adjunct to Direct Legislation.

I am aware that many members of the American P. R. League regard Proportional Representation as the more importThat may be open to argument when the two reforms are

ant reform of the two.

But

considered as abstract propositions. circumstances combine with resistless force to place Direct Legislation in the front rank at the present time, because:

It is better known and more widely advocated.

It is simpler, and the most ordinary intellect can grasp it.

The trend of events show that Direct Legislation will come first. South Dakota has already adopted it.

Enactment of the Initiative and Referendum would be a speedy and certain means of bringing about the enactment of Proportional Representation.

I am, therefore, well content to deal with my subject as collateral and subsidiary to Mr. Pomeroy's. At the same time I submit that Direct Legislation alone does not satisfy the needs of electoral and political reform. Proportional Representation is also required. Taken together, the ground is covered.

A presentation of Proportional Representation along with Direct Legislation is to the latter an element of strength that should not be overlooked. Many thoughtful persons with experience of politics hold that some system of government by elected representatives is necessary. Such per

sons are repelled when Direct Legislation is advocated as being in itself sufficient for all legislative purposes. Besides, one's sense of fairness is shocked when a truly representative system is confounded with and judged by the clumsy makeshifts, the non-representative and mis-representative

methods, by which legislators are now elected

There is also this great advantage in the study of a scientific and efficient system of electing officers and representatives; that it clears one's conceptions and enlarges one's knowledge of the fundamental principles of government, rendering one less likely to be carried away by fallacies and sophistries.

Above all, let us not put these two great reforms in antagonism to each other. Mrs. Malaprop said, "Caparisons is odorous.' Comparisons are indeed odious when made between kindred ref rms for the purpose of belittling or disparaging one or other of them.

Without further preface I shall present as plain and simple an exposition of the principles and practice of Proportional Representation as I am able to compile from the material at hand.

PRESENT METHODS.

The present machinery may be briefly shown by taking almost any State of the Union as an example, and examining the method of electing members to Congress or the State Legislature.

The whole State is cut up into little arbitrary districts, and in each of these districts the voters elect one member. A voter in one district can not, of course, vote for a candidate who is running in any other district. In each of these little districts or constituencies there are, say, from six to eight political ideas that desire expression and representation, as, for instance, the Republican idea, the Democratic idea, the Expansionist and anti-Expansionist ideas, the anti-Trust idea, the Direct Legislation idea, the Pop

ulist, Labor, Prohibition, Socialist, Woman Suffrage and Single Tax ideas. Some of these may not be numerically strong enough to entitle them to representation, in any event; but others certainly are. Yet all these varying and often conflicting ideas have either to find expression and representation in the one solitary member sent up from that district, or not to be repre

sented at all. Is not absurdity stamped plainly on the face of such a system?

Of course the result is practically that only one, or possibly two, of the leading ideas are represented, and the voters who hold the other ideas are all disfranchised and unrepresented.

But, if you like, we will leave out of consideration all the political ideas but the two large ones. Take, as an illustration, a district or constituency containing 4,000 votes. A Republican and a Democrat are running; 2,050 men vote for the Republi can candidate and 1,950 for the Democratic candidate. The Republican is elected. These 1,950 Democratic voters are as absolutely disfranchised and unrepresented as if an Act of Congress or the Legislature had been passed declaring that the Democrats in that district should have no vote at that election. Consider that this kind of thing takes place all through the United States, and you will see that as a matter of fact nearly one-h If the voters in the whole country, either on one side or the other, are disfranchised at every election. Is that popular representation?

Do you wonder at the party bitterness which obscures reason and calm judgment, when every election is a fight in which the penalty of defeat is disfranchisement and humiliation? But our elections need not be fights, and would not be under any reasonable and sensible system. An essential part of such a system would be to abolish the "one-member" districts. Instead of these, we can have districts large enough and containing voters enough to elect seven or more members; and we can elect these members in such a way as to give fair representation to every important phase of public opinion in fair proportion to the number of voters holding that opinion.

SOURCE OF PARTY POWER.

What is the back-bone and main-spring of the tremendous political power now wielded by the party "machine?" Mainly, the monopoly of nomination. No one has now a chance of election unless he is chos