The Unpopular Review Vol. I / January-June 1914

by Various

As a matter of fact the diametrical opposite of these things is what, upon a large survey of the state of the whole country, is unmistakably evident. It is doubtful whether one can point anywhere to a legislature owned as the Pennsylvania legislature used to be owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Maryland legislature by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the New Hampshire legislature by the Boston and Maine Railroad. Child labor laws and workmen's compensation laws are being enacted and strengthened in state after state, very much after the fashion in which the Australian ballot laws were being passed in state after state a quarter of a century ago. And as for our courts, the Supreme Court of the United States, once regarded as the very stronghold of extreme constitutionalism, has been steadily setting an example of liberal construction; while such a decision as that of the New York Court of Appeals in the Ives case is pointed to on all hands as being rather in the nature of a survival of a past attitude of mind than typical of the present temper of the courts of last resort in our leading states.

Nevertheless, enough remains, and more than enough, to constitute a serious grievance. The progress that has been made towards the removal of scandalous practices or exasperating impotence is not sufficient to justify complacency. But it is sufficient to dispose of that plea of desperate necessity to which advocates of the "rule of the people" are so prone to resort as over-riding all other considerations. Indeed, the state of mind of these advocates is in no small measure an illustration of that remarkable psychological phenomenon to which Herbert Spencer has drawn attention as marking the progress of reform agitations—that their excitement usually becomes most intense when the object to which they are directed has been almost attained. A dozen years ago it might plausibly have been urged that in our existing representative institutions effective control of public service corporations was impossible; but the railroad-rate legislation of the national Congress and the institution of Public Service Commissions in state after state have been accomplished without a jar. A few years ago it was still the fashion to speak of the United States Constitution as virtually incapable of amendment, this belief being based on the fact that, apart from the amendments brought about by the Civil War, none had been adopted since the early days of the republic. The adoption of the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments in rapid succession has disposed of that notion for good and all; and yet it is only now that a proposal to substitute an easy and rapid method of amendment in place of that now provided in the Constitution has been brought forward and urged. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that to-day's impatience with our existing governmental system, to-day's readiness to welcome short-cut remedies, is attributable rather to exasperation with the difficulties and evils of yesterday than to the conditions of to-day or the prospects of to-morrow.

Into the merits and defects of the various proposals for "direct rule of the people" it is not the purpose of this brief paper to enter in detail. Many valid considerations have been urged in their favor, and many sound objections have been advanced against them. Speaking generally, these arguments relate to the question of the honesty, intelligence, and efficiency of legislation as it has been, or is likely to be, affected by the change in question. Advocates of the new order have pointed to the well-known deficiencies of our legislatures as they are. Its opponents have given instances of errors, and of the misleading of voters, under the initiative system. In the main, however, since experience—in spite of Switzerland's long, but sparing, use of the method—has as yet been but of the slightest extent, serious writers on both sides have dwelt chiefly on the inherent tendency of the system. That it cannot cover the whole province of legislation both sides are fully agreed; and objectors lay chief stress on the inevitable tendency of the initiative-and-referendum system to reduce the importance and dignity of legislatures and consequently to end all hope of raising the quality of their membership, while advocates of the system set great store by the educative value of the exercise of direct legislative judgment upon the whole body of the citizenship.

There is, however, one consideration, and that perhaps the most vital of all, which appears to have been strangely neglected. Every-day efficiency, even every-day right-mindedness, is not the only thing about which there is occasion for solicitude. It seems usually to be forgotten on both sides of the discussion that there occur every now and then, in the history of a nation, questions of a crucial nature upon the right or wrong decision of which rest momentous and enduring consequences. Such questions, under the traditions of representative government as they have grown up in the course of ages, are fought out in a very different way from that which marks the ordinary routine of legislation and government. They are not settled by an instantaneous show of hands. What may take place in England if it shall come to be governed by a single chamber and under a closure system which makes parliamentary obstruction impossible, no man can say; but up to the present time nothing like this kind of unlimited rule by majority vote in a parliamentary body has existed either in that country or in our own. There has always been in both a possibility of resistance, in one form or another, to the immediate desire of a majority of the people's representatives; and this has profoundly affected the course of history upon those matters which are of most vital moment.

The difference between questions of this type and the ordinary subjects of every-day legislation is more than a mere difference of degree. It is not only that they are more momentous; they are different in kind, in that their decision involves a result which, humanly speaking, is irreversible. Nothing is more common than to say that if an act of the people should prove to be a mistake, they will correct that mistake. But there are mistakes that cannot be corrected. If the question of union or disunion had been put to the touch of a majority vote, and had been decided in favor of disunion, the result of that one day's voting would, in all human probability, have been a permanent severance of this nation into two mutually alien parts. Since the Civil War there has been one great issue which, though in a wholly different way, quite as distinctly illustrates the irrevocable character which the decision of a public question may have. It might be no calamity for this country to live, either temporarily or permanently, under a silver standard. But the truly vital point in the silver question which occupied the attention of the nation for twenty years was not that of the silver standard as such, but of the repudiation and currency-debasement involved in substituting the silver dollar, at the ratio of sixteen to one, for the gold dollar as the monetary unit. Had this substitution been effected, the repudiation and debasement would have taken place; and a subsequent return to the gold standard would not in the slightest degree have redressed the wrong. Under the existing system of government there was opportunity for obstruction, for compromise, for the effective influence of a few strong minds and a few powerful personalities. Under the "direct rule of the people" the whole matter might have been settled at a stroke; and it is by no means improbable that it would have been so settled, at some stage or other of the struggle, in favor of the silver standard. For it must be remembered that the very existence of this possibility would have stimulated in an incalculable degree the efforts of the silver agitators; and nothing is more probable than that during the years of depression, distress, and discontent that followed upon the panic of 1893, a moment would have been found when the popular cry of "more money" would have swept the country.

That questions not less fundamental, and the decision of which is not less irrevocable, are destined to arise in the future it should be unnecessary to argue. Never, in this country at least, has the atmosphere been so charged with issues affecting the very bases of the economic and social order. These issues are for the most part vague and undefined, but their gravity and sweep is none the less apparent. But if an illustration were needed of a more specific nature, and one which relates to a question partly of the past and partly of the future, such an illustration lies ready to hand. The agitation against the right of private property in land which was started forty years ago by Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" has only within the last few years become a serious factor in practical politics. The shape which it assumes in the actual proposals urged for immediate adoption is that of a mere reduction of the tax now levied on buildings and the placing of a corresponding additional tax on land. But the earnest advocates of this step and its earnest opponents alike rest their case on the animating purpose behind it. That purpose flows from the conviction, which its leading advocates often find it politic to keep in the background but which they seldom disavow, that the owners of land have no rights which, in the eye of justice, the rest of the community is bound to respect. The fiery zeal that shines through the pages of "Progress and Poverty" is animated by this conviction on the one hand, and on the other by the unhesitating belief that under the regime of private property in land human wretchedness must continually increase, while its abolition would carry with it the extinction of poverty. Henry George did not balk at the word confiscation. Indeed it is precisely the assertion of the right to confiscate land which, apart from the eloquent and plausible presentation, constituted the distinctive character of George's work. John Stuart Mill had long advocated the interception by the state of the "unearned increment" of the future, but firmly held that expropriation of landowners without compensation is morally indefensible. Henry George, in spite of his profound reverence for Mill, dismissed this judgment of the great liberal economist and philosopher with undisguised contempt. After quoting a certain passage from Mill, George exclaims:

In the name of the Prophet—figs! If the land of any country belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and justice, have the individuals called landowners to the rent? If the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?

But while Henry George was convinced that outright confiscation would be perfectly just, he proposed to accomplish the substance of confiscation without introducing its form. "Confiscation," he said, "would involve a needless shock to present customs and habits of thought;" and the method he proposed for achieving his end was "to abolish all taxation save that upon land values." But he made no pretence whatever of there being any difference in substance between the two things. It was of the essence of his plan that the single tax should be tantamount to confiscation. The mere placing of the present entire burden of taxation upon the landowners would be far from sufficing for his purpose; and he expressly counted on what he regarded as the inevitable and rapid growth of the land tax, when once his principle was acknowledged, to such dimensions as to swallow up the entire rental value of land. Not the mere expenses of government as we are now familiar with them, but all the outlay for social and individual betterment which the entire revenue now attaching to the ownership of land could supply was to be available for the public good. The idea of his program was epigrammatically, but sufficiently accurately, conveyed in a motto that was prominent in his campaign for mayor of New York: "No taxes at all, and a pension for everybody."

Now it requires no extraordinary effort of the fancy to imagine what would be the natural course of such an agitation as this under a system of government in which the idea of the direct rule of the people had become thoroughly established; and by "thoroughly established" we must understand, in the case of our own country, the dominance of that idea in the nation as well as in the separate States. If in those conditions a doctrine like that of Henry George were put forward, and commanded the devotion of a band of earnest and able men, the form which its propaganda would take would, in the nature of things, be wholly different from that which we have actually witnessed. The goal towards which all effort would be directed would be the obtaining of a popular majority for some single proposal, the adoption of which would insure the fulfilment of the great purpose. The preoccupation of the nation with other issues that divide parties or factions would be no hindrance. In order to bring the question up for immediate decision by popular vote, all that would be necessary would be the satisfaction of some minimum requirement laid down in the initiative system; a minimum requirement which, be it noted, under the principle of "direct rule," has for its only raison d'être the practical need of avoiding an intolerable multiplication of election questions. With this minimum satisfied, the champions of the change would advance to the charge year after year, fired with the consciousness that the gaining of a popular majority at the very next election would end once for all the iniquitous institution by which mankind has been robbed of its birthright, and make poverty and wretchedness a thing of the past.