But, it may be objected, is there after all any essential difference between this process and that which goes on under the traditional representative system, when it is truly representative? If the people are really convinced that land ownership is robbery, and that they should resume what they hold to be their own, are they not able, and ought they not to be able, to obtain their wish through the legislative assembly which represents them? The answer is that under the representative system as we know it—and quite as much at its best as at its worst—the influence of the wishes of the electorate upon the representative body is not uniform and mechanical. Representatives are elected not upon one issue, but upon many, and it is always a question how definite the popular "mandate" has been upon any one of them. From this alone it follows that there is a large, though indefinite, region in which a representative may feel free to act according to the dictates of his own individual judgment. In the case of any question involving a fundamental and momentous change, it is necessary that the mandate be extremely clear before it can be regarded by intelligent and conscientious legislators as binding upon them; and to accomplish this the strength of the feeling among the people in favor of the measure must be shown in ways far more emphatic, far more conclusive of a firm and fixed desire, than the mere existence of a majority vote. The issue must virtually raise itself to a prominence and intensity commensurate with its importance. It must find its way not merely to a position in which, when people are challenged to say yes or no, a few more say yes than say no, but to a position in which it dominates other issues and is seen to represent the deliberate and imperative desire of the people. And when we add to this the constitutional checks that have thus far obtained both in England and in this country, together with the legitimate possibilities of parliamentary obstruction, we see how profound is the difference between the representative system and that of direct rule. It may almost be likened to the difference between a living organism, endowed with the power of discrimination and judgment, and a crude mechanical contrivance. In the one case, a great issue has to go through an ordeal fitted to its nature; in the other, it is put into the hopper along with the veriest trifles of every-day business, and its fate is settled by the same monotonous turn of the wheel.
The difference which I have been endeavoring to bring out is not identical either with the difference between conservatism and progressiveness or the difference between carefulness and looseness in legislation. Much has been said both for and against "direct rule" as related to these qualities; it has been contended that direct legislation is more conservative and less conservative, more prone to error and less prone to error, than legislation by representative assemblies. But what is usually held in view, on both sides, is the course of what I have been referring to as every-day legislation. Important, however, as the question may be in relation to such matters, the transcendent issue involved in the question of direct rule of the people is how it would operate in those supreme trials which the nation is sure to be called upon in the future, as it has been in the past, to undergo. The cardinal objection that I find to it is not that it is radical or that it is careless, but that it is intrinsically incapable of making that vital distinction which should be made between these grand issues and the ordinary questions of legislative routine. And no merely mechanical modification would overcome this difficulty. The influences which, upon great occasions, have been brought into play to stay the flood of immediate popular desire perform a function for which no automatic device can serve as a substitute. These influences are sometimes noble, as in Cleveland's adamantine resistance to currency debasement, or in the act of the seven Republican Senators who, at tragic cost to themselves, voted against the conviction of Andrew Johnson; sometimes ignoble, as in the gigantic campaign fund raised by Mark Hanna in 1896; sometimes not specially to be marked with any moral label, but embodying the weight naturally accorded, in any system except that of the absolute and mechanical rule of the majority, to intellectual ability and personal force as such. Under the system of direct rule of the people, all possibility of such interposition would be swept away. Union or disunion, currency debasement or currency integrity, land confiscation or the observance of the rights of property—issues like these could be brought before the people with the same facility as a measure authorizing the purchase of a toll-road or defining the duties of a sheriff; and their fate would be decided by the same simple yes or no of the majority.
Opponents of direct rule are more or less in the habit of speaking of it as the rule of the mob. Its advocates have no trouble in disposing of this characterization by pointing out that the distinguishing mark of a mob is disorder or lawlessness, while the process of taking a vote of the people, on measures even more than on men, is eminently orderly and regular. The phrase is open to objection; taken literally, it cannot be defended. But in all probability what those who use it really mean, more or less distinctly, is something very like what has been dwelt on in this paper. What they have in mind is not the turbulence of the mob, but its brute power, its inaccessibility to complex considerations, its incapacity for taking counsel or modifying its purpose, the dumb finality of its acts. A system under which the highest questions of fundamental public policy were submitted to the peremptory decision of a majority vote at the polls would be so vitally different from the system of representative government as we have known it that, allowance made for the picturesque exaggeration of the figure, the likening of it to mob rule is by no means without excuse.
There are of course many advocates of the initiative and referendum who qualify their support in various ways; and, so far as that goes, there are many opponents who admit that, within proper limitations, these methods may be desirable. With all this I am not concerned. The real force behind the general movement—including not only direct legislation but also the recall of judges and the nullification of judicial decisions by popular vote—is the dogma of the inherent rightfulness of the unlimited rule of the majority. In the collection of papers on the subject issued by the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading place is given to a paper by Senator Bourne, of Oregon. Of any hesitation as to the application of the direct legislation method to the irreversible decision of fundamental questions, he shows not the faintest trace. On the contrary, it is precisely to questions of the highest moment, to the decision of issues of great sweep and significance, that he regards the application of the direct vote as peculiarly just and desirable. "It is not proposed," he says, "that the people shall act directly in all the intricate details of legislation." The great function of the initiative is in the field of ideas: "Under the initiative any man can secure the submission of his ideas to a vote of all the people, provided eight per cent. of the people sign a petition asking that the measure he proposes be so submitted." That any such question, so submitted, will be decided as it should be, Senator Bourne not only does not doubt, but apparently does not imagine that anybody else can be so perverse as to doubt. "The people of a state will never vote against their own interests, hence they will never vote to adopt a law unless it proposes a change for the improvement of the general welfare." No sign of consciousness that there may be a difference between the interests of the majority and the interests of the whole people, between immediate interests and permanent interests, between apparent interests and real interests; still less of any possible conflict between interests—as that word is commonly understood—and the abiding principles of justice or of honor. The 300,000 are certain to be right if the count of noses against them is but 290,000. To be sure, no rational man can actually believe this; and there is little doubt that Senator Bourne would repudiate such an interpretation of his words. But there is equally little doubt as to the position he would fall back upon. "The chief function"—this is the declaration with which he opens his discussion—"the chief function of the initiative and referendum is to restore the absolute sovereignty of the people." The idea that the sovereignty of the people means absolute and unrestricted rule over the whole people according to the immediate will and pleasure of fifty-one per cent. of the people—a crude error whose almost unchallenged currency among the "progressives" of our day is one of the most remarkable psychological phenomena of our time—lies at the bottom of the whole direct-rule propaganda.
THE DEMOCRAT REFLECTS
The Democrat was disillusioned, but he really was a democrat. He had been cradled and taught in the atmosphere of democracy, and was possessed by lifelong conviction of the righteousness of the democratic ideal. For a long time, too—until he had come to know more of the actual business of democracy—he had never questioned democratic practice. He was young and innocent.
But the scales had fallen from his eyes; the enlightened vision of manhood's years had disclosed in democracy a multitude of undemocratic things of whose existence in his youthful days he had not even dreamed. The preceptors of his boyhood had never told him—or his hopeful heart had not let him understand—that men had to struggle against other men to preserve even that equality to which they were born; that justice, even in the courts, could be, in the very nature of things, nothing more than an approximation, and that, among men of the world in general, it was often might that made right; that there were ways of depriving men of the ballot, in spite of enactments; that laws could be made by the will of minorities, or of single individuals. Even town-meetings could sometimes be undemocratic, and his ears were startled by those who declared that, in the nation's life at large, there was nothing left of democracy but seeming.
His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in democracy—quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never imagined. Surely, the love of money was the root of all evil—or of nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole belonged to men with axes to grind. Yes, the press, that boasted educator of the people, of whose wondrous achievement and potentiality—yes, and whose freedom—he and his schoolfellows had written and declaimed, was sometimes bought. Votes at the polls and in legislative halls were sometimes bought. Contracts with the government were sometimes bought. Expert scientific opinion was sometimes bought. War scares were manufactured for a purpose. Great industries could use intimidation to secure a party the votes of their employees. There was no form of meanness in life high or low that could not find ready a hand for its undertaking. Cities were sinks of rottenness and suffering because it paid their democratic administrators to have them so. The greed of men could force other men to live and beget their children in unhealthful, degrading environment, birth into which was birth into slavery and disease of body and soul. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was a mockery to tens of thousands.