He

Secondly, what is the method of religion? Look first at Christ's method. He took twelve men, and they were a great deal more men when he got through with them than when he began. Did He lay down minute rules regulating in an orderly, educational manner all the details of their lives while they were training? Many of the great religious teachers, both before and since, have done this. He did not. It is difficult to point to a place where He prohibited or enjoined specific actions. laid down great principles and left His followers to apply them or not. If they had clear grasp of the truth and strength they made these principles their own and applied them fully. If they were weak or imperfectly grasped the truth they applied them weakly. In either case they learned by thus interpreting the truth into action. They were prevented thereby from losing the truth completely when the performance had degenerated into a senseless iteration, when the husk is grasped and the kernel lost.

He then drew men out, made more of them. Did He tell the people to stone the woman taken in adultery, as was the law, or to let her go as mercy indicated? No; He said: "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone," thus stating a great principle. His hearers applied it, and they slunk off one by one. He forced His hearers to choose.

This is God's method in the Old Testament. How often do the prophets and lawmakers say: "If ye will walk in my statutes," etc., or, "Choose this day whom ye will serve. This happens all through Old Testament history.

It is His method in nature and life. Man is free to choose. If he chooses wrong, he suffers and learns by that suffering. God makes men thereby. The same is true of a nation. The religious method is by perfect freedom of choice, followed inevitably by the effects of that choice-good if the choice is wise, painful if not.

How can this method and principle be carried into politics? By ruling men? No. It does not make any difference whether

the ruler is a king, an aristocracy or a plutocracy, and in some respects the last is the worst. There is no equality under them for the people, nor any chance for them to choose. It can only be obtained in selfgovernment or a government by the people. No people can be self-governed who are denied the right to vote yes and no on every law by which they are to be governed. This is Direct Legislation by the Initiative and Referendum, by which a suitable minority of the people can propose any law and can cause any law, either passed by the law-drafting body or emanating from the people, to go to a vote of the people where the people, each with an equal vote, will choose how they are to be governed. This is self-government and equality. It is carrying into the highest, most far-reaching, grandest side of politics the fundamental religious principles of brotherhood and equality and the equality and the fundamental religious method of choosing.

Furthermore, we are called "sons of God," "heirs and joint-heirs with Christ." Man partakes of the divine. He is divine. And that divinity resides not perhaps as fully and as strongly, but it resides in the most degraded criminal as well as the loftiest spiritual teacher, and as the whole is greater than any of its parts, so you will find that the will of the people, the great common people of whom Lincoln said God must have loved them, He made so many of them, when it is calmly, deliberately and fully stated, when it rises above the din of fighting factions, above the clamor of contending partisans, above the clash of vested interests, above the fool clangor of demagogues, and the cries of blind leaders and the shouts of fanatics, comes nearer to the voice of God in its passion for righteousness, its appreciation of the truth and the finality of its power than any other known thing on this struggling earth.

"History," says Herron, "is the progressive disclosure of the self-government of man as the providential design." Direct Legislation is the next step in the self-government of society and in the spread of the kingdom of God in politics.

Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, with a membership of more than a million trade unionists:

"I have full faith in the people. The safety of the future as well as the interests of the present can safely be entrusted in their hands. The whole are more honest, more intelligent than the few. We must soon choose whether we are to have an oligarchy or a democracy. All lovers of the human family, all who earnestly strive for political reform, economic justice and social enfranchisement must range themselves on the side of organized labor in this demand for direct legislation."

Hon. Marion Butler, United States Senator from North Carolina:

"Do I believe in direct legislation? Let the facts speak. I have been trying to pass a resolution in the United States Senate for the appointment of a special committee to consider into the feasibility of applying it to Federal legislation, but there is considerable prejudice in the Senate against the creating special committees, particularly when the Senate is not especially friendly to the object. The cry is always raised that a regular committee of the Senate should make such investigations. I have never been able to get my previous resolution reported from the Committee on Contingent Expenses. Recently I have made a new move by introducing a new resolution instructing the Committee on Privileges and Elections to make this investigation. I succeeded in getting it to a vote, and it passed on June 23."

Rev. B. Fay Mills, the eloquent pulpit orator and Christian Socialist:

"I will hold up both hands for the initiative and referendum. I sometimes think I agree with those who feel that this should be the next step in social reconstruction, as

I certainly believe it will be productive of all others.

"I believe the revelation of God is in the conscience of all the people. Mazzini says that whoever makes a religion out of democracy will save the world."

Lord Salisbury, the English Premier, and leader of the Conservative party of Great Britain:

"I believe that nothing could oppose a bulwark to popular passion except an arrangement for deliberate and careful reference of any matter in dispute to the votes of the people, like the arrangements existing in the United States and Switzerland."

To this may be added the following significant statement from the editor of London's greatest newspaper:

"At the election of 1895, the referendum occupied a certain place. The official leaflet issued from the central Conservative offices, to explain and enumerate the items of the party program, placed the referendum third on the list of Unionist aims. A firm imperial policy comes first. Then follows a strong navy. Third comes the referendum. The referendum may thus fairly be said to have emerged from obscurity."J. St. Loe Strachey, editor of the London Spectator.

Samuel E. Moffett, formerly editor of the San Francisco Examiner, now one of the editors of the New York Journal:

"Direct legislation is no longer merely desirable; it has become essential to the safety, if not to the continued existence, of the republic. A few years ago the representative system was in decay-now it is dead. Then we had many bad representatives-now we have substantially no representatives, good or bad, at all. This is literally true of State Legislatures and city

councils, and it is becoming increasingly true of Congress. The former congeries of representatives, some honest and some corrupt, each acting from his individual motives, has given way to the boss, who owns the legislative power in bulk, and takes contracts to 'jam through' any measure whose sponsors are willing to pay his price. The

people, enraged by successive betrayals, and realizing the hopeless folly of turning out one boss to make room for another, are in a dangerous mood. The only way of keeping their rising indignation within the bounds of order is to give them some peaceful method of controlling their own affairs. That is what direct legislation would do.”

"A majority held in restraint by constitutional check and limitation and always changed easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible. So that rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism, in some form, is all that is left."-Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural.

"Not the centralization, but the diffusion of power is the safety of the present; it is also the lesson of history and the divine method."-Prof. Geo. D. Herron.

"The welfare of the whole instead of that of a part, were henceforth to be the paramount purpose of the social order. Dimly your nineteenth

The methods of Socialism are co-ordination, co-operation and combination to get the best results from the forces latent in nature, man and society. Its aim is equality, not of character or capacities, but of conditions and opportunities. Its spirit is brotherhood. The adoption of the method without the aim and spirit will be disastrous to any society which attempts it. We are on the verge of such adoption now.

The whole trend of our times is toward Socialism. Manufactures are to-day almost completely socialized under private control, and they are becoming more fully socialized every day. That is, fewer and fewer men are working directly for themselves, but they are working in combination with others, sometimes thousands, for a common end. The method is the method of Socialism; the aim is not equality of op

century philosophers seem to have perceived that the general diffusion of intelligence introduced a very important force into the social evolution, but they were wall-eyed in their failure to see the certainty with which it foreshadowed a complete revolution of the economic basis of society in the interest of the whole body of the people as opposed to class interest or partial interest of every sort. The first effect was the democratic movement by which personal and class rule in political matters was overthrown in the name of the supreme interest and authority of the people. It is astonishing that there should have been any intelligent persons who did not perceive that political democracy was but the pioneer corps of economic democracy, clearing the way and providing the instrumentality for the substantial part of the program-the equalization of the distribution of work and wealth."-Edward Bellamy.

portunity, but the benefit of the few. The aim is not the aim of Socialism. The spirit is not the spirit of brotherhood, but that of greed. There is a radical discord between the method and the aim and spirit, and this produces strikes, lockouts and labor-wars, and it cannot be remedied till the method and the aim and spirit work in unison. It looks as though the method had been irrevocably adopted; if so, it will in time compel the adoption of an aim and spirit in harmony with it.

As an illustration take the making of shoes. At one time the cobbler used to buy his leather from his friend, the farmer, and make the shoes and sell them to his neighbors. Now great factories dot the country where shoes are made at less than a tenth of the former labor-cost and which employ men by the hundreds. The individ

ual shoe-maker is gone. This is shown by the change in the meaning of the word cobbler, which now means a repairer or mender. The socialized shoe-maker is here.

Agriculture is not so fully socialized, but it is rapidly becoming so. See the bonanza wheat farms and the syndicate cattle ranches of the West and the creameries which within the last decade have sprung up on the New England hillsides.

Prospecting is occasionally the work of individuals, but mining on any scale is socialized, though still under private control.

The great transportation systems of our country are completely socialized under private control. And the corporations in control are growing fewer every day. Less than fifty corporations control three-fourths of the railway mileage of the United States. The telegraph system is under one unified control. The telephone systems are under one control in each locality, and these companies are being bound together into one huge system. They are like snow balls, started small, but, rolling downhill, they grow larger and larger, and the larger they grow the more momentum do they get.

In actual distribution to the people, look how the department stores are swallowing up the small individual merchant. Fight it as he does, the merchant finds his profits decreasing. He must either increase his business or decrease his expenses or go to the wall. This means fewer and larger stores. Socialism in the method of distribution, though not yet in its aim and spirit, is being substituted for individualism in method and spirit.

In many organizations, manufacturing and distributing are united and socialized, though still for private benefit; such are the Standard Oil Co., the Sugar Trust, the American School Book Co., etc. These are more complete application of the method of Socialism, as they unite functions, and hence more dangerous if not democratized and the aim made harmonious with the method.

When our national bank system was established nearly forty years ago, it was easy for any one with a small amount of capital to go into it. Soon the field became filled. Now it is completely filled and very difficult to successfully start a new bank. The banks

are drawing together with their different organizations, their papers and columns in the daily press. They are becoming a power in the land by co-operation and combination. They are striving for legislation to permit the establishment of branch banks. which will mean the freezing out of the smaller banks and the establishment of the larger ones in their places or fewer banks and easier to combine. They are grasping for a complete control of the currency of the country. This would be a benefit if the aim was the common and not private good.

They are like a gigantic monster in some dark cavern of the sea, slowly, silently, surely wrapping its tentacles around every center of commerce and industry that it may completely control the exchanges of the country through the currency, which is the country's life-blood. Already it is sucking the vitality of the land for the benefit of the few-the method of Socialism without its spirit and aim.

This same trend toward Socialism is seen in all our forms of government. The local governments are making better roads, better schools, more free libraries, more of everything that makes life enjoyable. The cities are giving much more attention to waterworks, paving, lighting, markets, parks, street-cars, etc. In the sphere of the state we are getting better courts, prisons, asylums, colleges, forestry, river improvements, etc. In the national government we see the extension and socialization of function in such things as the weather-bureau, patent system, census and labor statistics, military and many other matters. In local affairs, these new or enlarged functions are almost completely democratized or under the control of the people, and this is true in a large though less degree of the more centralized functions. Yet while this movement is rising as irresistibly as the coming in of the tide, there is a growing and very dangerous tendency to turn it into special channels and draw it off from benefiting the whole. This is separating the method of Socialism from its aim and spirit.

We see this same trend toward at least the methods of Socialism, in all our social life. In the great increase in numbers, power and functions of voluntary organizations. These reach from religious, charitable and