received and before it is submitted to popular vote, the original ordinance and the amended bill shall together be referred to the people, so that they may make their choice or, if it be their will, reject both propositions. In the same manner a referendum may be demanded on any by-law proposed and passed by the local legislative boards,―at a regular electionby a petition signed by fifteen per cent of the voters of the city, county, etc., and at a special election by a petition containing the signatures of twenty per cent. of the voters. "Urgent ordinances" are excepted from the provisions of the act and may be passed definitively to go into effect at once. 60

Of a purely American development, the outgrowth of native conditions existing before the wave of Swiss influence swept over the country, is the initiative as we find it in California and Iowa. A law of California contains the following interesting provision: "Whenever there shall be presented to the board of supervisors a petition or petitions signed by legal voters of said county equal in number to fifty per cent of the votes cast at the last preceding general election, asking that an ordinance to be set forth in such petition be submitted to a vote of the qualified voters of such county it shall be the duty of the board of supervisors by due proclamation to submit such proposed ordinance to the vote of the qualified voters of such county. The election shall be conducted and the returns canvassed in all respects as provided by law for the conducting of general elections and canvassing the returns thereof. If a majority of the votes cast upon such ordinance shall be in favor of the adoption thereof the board of supervisors shall proclaim such fact and thereupon such ordinance thus adopted shall have the same and equal force and effect as though adopted and ordained by the board of supervisors." 61

This "board of supervisors" is a body composed of five members who are elected by the people of each county by the

60

Compiled Statutes of Nebraska, 1897, pp. 588 et seq.

61 Statutes and Amendments to the Code of California, 1893, p. 348.

system, to borrow the French term, of scrutin d'arrondissement and not scrutin de liste, the latter being the method usually employed in making choice of county government boards in the American States. The supervisors hold office for four years and to them are committed very extensive legislative and administrative powers with respect to local matters of various kinds.

Likewise in the State of Iowa the board of supervisors may submit to the people of any county at a regular election, or a special election to be called for that purpose, "the question whether money may be borrowed to aid in the erection of any public buildings and the question of any other local or police regulation not inconsistent with the laws of the State". Propositions for the repeal of local regulations may be referred to the people by the board of supervisors in the same manner. Furthermore the board “shall ", i. e., it must submit "the question of the adoption or rescission of such a measure when petitioned therefor by one-fourth of the voters of the county". Whether the vote is taken on the motion of the board or of the people themselves "on being satisfied that a majority of votes were cast in favor of the proposition" the supervisors "shall cause the same and the result of the vote to be entered at large in the minute book and the proposition shall take effect and be in force thereafter " 62

Summarizing these results for the initiative we find, therefore, that one State, South Dakota, grants the people the right of initiative on the large matter of State laws. The petition must be signed by a number of electors equal to five per centum of the votes cast for Governor at the last preceding general election, while with respect to the initiative in local districts on local by-laws and ordinances the showing is as follows:63

62 Annotated Code of the State of Iowa, 1897, secs. 443 et seq.

63 It must be noted always of course that the initiative and the referendum on municipal laws in South Dakota, Nebraska, California, Iowa and San Francisco apply to local laws locally enacted, not to local laws received from the State legislature such as we have been considering in the earlier part of this chapter. Cf. ante, p. 307.

Unit.

Number of petitioners necessary to

initiate.

South Dakota.. Cities and towns, Five per cent of the votes cast at

The fact must be kept in mind therefore that if the referendum is not unknown to our political system in the United States, so likewise is the initiative no stranger among our institutions. Both have been developing side by side until they have become familiar to us by general usage in all but every State in the great American Republic.

CHAPTER XVI

THE REFERENDUM VS. THE REPRESENTATIVE SYSTEM

It will now be desirable, I think, to summarize and review in a final chapter the results of our studies and investigations. It would not be safe, perhaps, to make any prophecies regarding the future of the initiative and the referendum in the United States. The philosophical movement led by J. J. Rousseau, which had for its natural consequence the upheavals in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was a mere vague and fanciful appeal for a new political order, in which the people would receive back their own from unauthorized agents who had got into control of the machinery of government and maintained themselves there through the complexity of the political organization. It was a protest aimed against monarchical forms, as they were these forms that then prevailed nearly everywhere. Although primary assemblies were spoken of as the ideals in government it was not supposed, even by Rousseau himself, that Paris or France could be ruled by a town meeting, and a ballot system of the modern type had not yet been devised. The people were still to act through representatives, albeit as a necessary evil from which it was thought there could be no escape, at any rate in populous countries of a large territorial area. The result was a demand for a representative system with the elimination of kings, governors and indeed all magistrates who were not directly elected by the people and were not directly responsible to them. The struggle which followed was between those who wished to organize this representative system after two different plans. The radical wing declared its preferences for a government by an unchecked convention of a single house which was to be legislature, ex

ecutive and judiciary combined in one. The other wing, led so ably in this country by John Adams, aimed to give the new government a more complex form so that it might withstand the first gust and effectually perform the great tasks set for it to do while at the same time owing the necessary responsibility to the people. That this contest was a bitter and prolonged one, I think I have shown in this essay, in some early chapters from the constitutional history of Pennsylvania where the struggle centred on this continent. England, unmoved by the storms which have shaken France, has gone forward by a gradual process developing a type of government that is greatly admired in all parts of the world. Our own government, especially as a Federal model, has attracted much attention and in one form or another the representative< system with the main features of a congress or parliament elected by the people, and a president or king with a cabinet which is usually responsible to the parliament, has spread over the civilized earth being incorporated in all the leading constitutions of Europe, America, Africa, Australasia and even in Japan.

Although parliamentary government has been so widely introduced and has now so generally come to supersede other forms of government in which the people are not directly represented in a legislature, the system is not without its weaknesses. These have manifested themselves in a great variety of ways. They have pressed themselves on the attention of thinking men throughout a long period of years in many different lands, and it is natural that some corrective should be eagerly sought. It is very generally understood that any system in which the people are not represented in a parliament, and by which they must take and obey such laws as others make for them, is quite distasteful to most modern populations. If such tractable peoples can be found and they are willing peaceably to be governed by a few men it is. not to be denied that the state may be so organized as very much to advance the social interests of the inhabitants. In recent years the progress made by the Russian nation and by