Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.-Thomas Jefferson, in first inaugural address.

By nature every individual has the right to govern himself, and governments must derive their right from the assent, expressed or implied, of the

The great truth which individualists bring prominently forward is that if the individual is free he will, on the average, develop because he is free, because no one is over him to direct and coerce him, and thus cramp his faculties, destroy his initiative and make him less of a man. To this they often add that the only way to develop society is to develop the individual units which compose society. This last is very misleading, unless it is joined with its correlative that society is both an effect of the development of the individual units which compose it and a cause of such development, and as it grows stronger and more complex, it becomes more potent

as a cause.

While advice rightly given and received is always good to develop character, while during immaturity government is necessary and beneficial in the development of the individual, yet when maturity has arrived, or some say even drawn near, the wisest government is cramping to the individual and worse than the mistakes which inexperience makes; disastrous as the immediate effects of these mistakes may seem, the individual learns by them because they are his mistakes. Thus there is a fuller development of the individual than is possible under the wisest form of outside government. The worst form of self-government is better than the best form of outside government or coercion. Their watch-word is freedom.

What is freedom? It is often on our lips, a shibboleth we fight for, a name we bow down to. Is it that each can do what he pleases? It may be; it may not be. For

governed and be subject to such limitation as they impose.-John C. Calhoun.

When the represented is present, the representative ceases to exist.-Jean Jasques Rousseau.

Direct legislation by the people must inevitably result in the simplification of the law and its instant simplification; for the law will be more rational and more in conformity with the general interest.-Martin Rittinghausen.

that may degenerate into license, the caricature and opposite of true freedom.

If I please to do something which injures you, then I am limiting your freedom. If each was to be perfectly free to do as he wished, without consideration for others. then this country could not hold seventy millions of people, nor seventy thousand. nor seventy hundred, but perhaps seventy people, if properly scattered, could live here because of the animal limitations of human strength in going from place to place. But as soon as two of these human beings meet, the social instinct draws them together and each has to give up some of the complete license to do as he pleases, which heretofore was only limited by his own unaided human powers as opposed to the untamed nature around him. In return he gets, by combination with his fellow-men, a greater power over nature, thus removing natural limitations from him and raising him to a wider freedom, he gets a greater power in himself, making grander and finer his thoughts, emotions and sensibilities and lastly, as society grows, it develops an organism of itself separate and distinct from the life of the individual. The accumulating inheritance of the past forms a mold out of which the social energy and life of the present bud and blossom, ever opening new aspects of freedom to the individual. Thus, as civilization progresses, the individual is ever giving up the lower and outgrown and unnecessary freedoms of savagery, of license, of lower and nature-limited life for the higher and larger and finer freedoms of

nature-commanding life, of social life, of moral, intellectual and spiritual individual development. If properly developed, he has with each step more freedom and not less.

As soon as two human beings come together there is the birth, inchoate, unnoticed, rudimentary of the moral social consciousness, and as society grows it grows till the definition of freedom becomes clear.

It is that each can do as he ought, not as he might, could or would, but as he should, unless these coincide with what he should. It is the opportunity to do as he should. It is doing, freedom or free doing and a conscious and free choosing of the doing. It is self-government. It is not the doing as a king or priest says, no matter how just and right that dictation may be. It is the right doing as the individual dictates for himself if the doing only concerns the individual. If the doing concerns the community it is as that community dictates for itself and not as somebody chosen out of or outside of that community says it shall do. Such a rule may be beneficent; it is more often maleficent and in time it will become a tyranny. At its best it is not self-government; it is not freedom.

Neither is this free doing anarchy in the ordinary understanding of that word; for anarchy, as its etymology implies, is doing without laws and government.

True freedom is not a doing without laws, but a getting above them, a using of them as a scaffold to get to larger freedoms. When walking on a city's crowded street, I keep to the right, as the law of custom demands, thus giving up the lower liberty of going anywhere I please for the larger and finer privileges the street with its customlaw affords of social and business intercourse. As far as you and I desire, the law against murder might just as well not be on the statute books. We have no wish to violate it. We are above it. It does not limit our freedom. But it does prevent others who are not as advanced as we are from murdering us. Thus progress is not conditioned on the limitations of the least developed, but in both cases the laws whether custom-made or legal are the scaffolding whereby we get a wider and finer freedom. Of course, this presupposes that the laws are the deliberately formed and carefully

framed true opinions of the people and not the edict of a king or the utterance of a class in its own interest.

Whether or no this is philosophical anarchism, it is what I understand individualism to be, though so great has been the abuse of law-making in the last half-century that many extreme individualists are inclined to take the anarchist position and say: "Let us have no laws at all."

A nation fights for its autonomy. What is meant by that word autonomy? Simply national freedom for self-government, freedom to do the right as it sees it, freedom even to make mistakes if those mistakes do not interfere with some neighboring nation's like freedom. For mistakes are the surest schoolmaster and corrective. Yet a nation, though having complete autonomy, is not free to do or allow flagrant wrongdoing, else other nations interfere to stop it, as in the Armenian massacres. At least this is the theory, though the practice is at present very imperfect, because the will of the people is not followed.

So each locality should preserve, by fighting, if need be, its autonomy, its state's rights, its community rights. In the things which only concern itself, it should have complete autonomy, that is self-government, true freedom. In things which concern a larger locality or community of which the smaller is a part, the smaller should acquiesce in the will of the larger when that will is properly expressed. But if the matter only concerns the smaller community, no other power than that community should decide that matter. If it only concerns the individual, the individual alone should decide it. Anything else is not selfgovernment, but tyranny; it injures both the man or body that exercises it, and the man or body it is exercised on. The same rule applies to individuals.

Who shall judge whether a matter concerns an individual or a locality or between a smaller locality and a larger one?

This, I take, is the kernel of the whole controversy between anarchy and socialism, though not between true individualism and socialism. The anarchist answers this question directly the contrary to the answer I give. The individualist perhaps reluctantly gives the same answer.

it will not do to make the individual or the smaller locality the judge as to what concerns it alone. He or it would decide in his own favor as against the larger locality, and this in time would lead to anarchy, chaos, planlessness. The individual on the average is more biased about his own rights than the community about its community rights, because the small community is composed of individuals and each individual, when he comes to define the line between the rights and powers of the individual and the community, even if it is to apply at that time to other individuals, will see that it affects him, and will want a just division. The small community is on the average more biased about its rights at the time the necessity for a division comes up than the larger community about its rights, because the larger community is composed of the smaller. If the decision of the whole people of the larger community, not some special class or small body in it, is carefully and accurately obtained, it will be safer to leave the exact limitation of the

of

rights of the smaller community in the hands of the larger community than anywhere else. The same rule applies to the Individual in his relation to the community.

How are we to get true freedom, selfgovernment, and to be complete it must not only be political but social, economic, industrial, intellectual, and embrace all of the sides and activities of life. The next step toward freedom is political self-government. It we partially have now. Through it the others can be obtained. Through it the education necessary for the others can be gained. How can we get political self-government? We have done away with the middle-man in religion. A man can worship as he pleases. We have done away with the middle-man in our intellectual life; a man can think as he pleases. We have partially done away with the middle-man in our governmental life, but not completely. The people themselves must have the final say on the laws which govern them. Then will the people have complete self-government in political matters.

The path has been blazed in this country by the New England town-meeting, by the method of ratifying the fundamental law of the land, the national and State constitu

tions, by many thousands of local referendums, by the experience of the trades unions. The path has been made plain and straight and buttressed by the experience of the model republic of the old world, Switzerland.

The principle at the bottom of this is that a suitable minority of the people may demand that any law passed by the law-making body shall be referred to a poll of the whole people interested and also that a suitable minority of the people may initiate any law for their governance which after a fit discussion shall go to a poll of the whole people interested and their decision shall, in both cases, be final.

The first is called the referendum, the referring to the people; the second, the initiative, the starting of a law. The referendum is negative, preventive; the initiative is positive, constructive. The two together constitute direct legislation in distinction to our present system of indirect legislation, where the people give the complete control of legislation to men selected nominally by the people, but really by party managers. Through direct legislation the people can have the complete and constant control of the making of the laws which govern them. This is self-government. It is the necessary political step toward larger social and economic freedom.

Under direct legislation any locality alone could veto any law passed by the Legislature which was not general in its application. It can make for itself the laws which it needs to govern itself. This means complete local self-government. It is full adherence to the wise saying: "Where the law is administered, there it should be made."

Hence the first step toward true freedom for the nation, the state, the locality, the individual is the complete autonomy of each division of the body politic from the nation down to the smallest locality and the individual to be obtained through direct legislation. Complete local self-government thus and thus only is obtainable. By it the people's will can easily be found and quickly embodied into law.

In this country we have a fairly good delimitation of the sphere or definition of the duties of the national government, but the

State governments tyrannize over the municipal and local governments. The Legislature of Illinois makes laws for Chicago which three-fourths at least of the people of Chicago don't want. The farmer legislators at Albany impose their will, or rather their ignorance, on the imperial city of New York against its expressed wishes, with at times disastrous effects. Under direct legislation a law which applied to only one locality could be vetoed by that locality, thus giving it self-government, tnus forcing the laws, as Rittinghausen says, to be "more rational and more in conformity with the general interest."

Lastly, as an absolute necessity, if we are to achieve freedom, self-government in the nation, the state, the municipality or locality and the individual, direct legislation will force the simplification of laws both in number, in wording and in principles applied. During 1892 there were nearly thirteen thousand national and State laws passed. The Legislature of New Jersey alone passed six hundred, some of which were longer than the whole Justinian code governing the Roman Empire for centuries. The Legislature of New York passed in 1897 747 laws and in the last Congress 24,000 laws and resolutions were introduced. It is growing worse, in a geometrical ratio. Not only are the laws of one year piled on those of all past years, but each yearly dump of laws is larger than the preceding years. Then the law-making bodies, recognizing their inefficiency and verbosity, are creating lawdrafting commissions, and the courts, interpreting ambiguous phraseology now one

"All writers on government agree, and the feelings of the human mind witness the truth of these political axioms, that man is born free and possessed of certain inalienable rights; that government is instituted for the protection, safety and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honor or private interest of any man, family or class of men; that the origin of all power is in the people, and that they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain

way, now another, are still further complicating the tangle. A shrewd, painstaking lawyer can find a law or decision which will make legal almost any act.

Compare this with the cantons of Berne and Zurich in Switzerland, where they have the obligatory referendum-every law has to be voted on by the people. During the last score of years they have passed an average of between four and five laws a year. These laws are based on general principles, are short, simple and easily understood. In proportion to the population, Switzerland has one-seventh of the lawyers that we have in the United States.

To summarize-the individualist wants freedom or self-government as being the best for the development of the individual, the locality, the state, the nation. He can get self-government in direct legislation, and there is no other method before the people by which he can get it. He recognizes that the nation, state, locality and individual each have spheres of action, and all the individuals composing the nation are the ones to define its sphere of action, then all the individuals in a state are the ones to define its sphere of activities, providing none of these conflict with the national activities, which are supreme. The same rule applies to the sphere of local government and of the individual. Direct legislation is the only method of obtaining the clear and explicit voice of the people when they are ready to define any sphere of activity. Lastly, as an immediate and practical reason, it will simplify laws in number, wording and principles embodied.

powers to guard the life, liberty and property of the community. And if certain selected bodies of men, deputed on these principles, determine contrary to the wishes of their constituents, the people have an undoubted right to reject their decisions, to call for a revision of their conduct, to depute others in their room, or, if they think proper, to demand further time for deliberation on matters of the greatest moment."Elbridge Gerry, member from Massachusetts of Constitutional Convention.