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The term of office of government officials should be lengthened or shortened; the number of members in governing bodies should be increased or decreased; there should be direct primaries, referendum, recall, government by commission; powers should be shifted here and there with a hope of meeting obvious mischances all too familiar in the past.
Without the Referendum, no municipality in Pennsylvania may contract an aggregate debt beyond 2 per cent of the assessed valuation of its taxable property; no municipalities in certain other states may incur in any year an indebtedness beyond their revenues; no local governments in the new states of the West may raise any loans whatever; none in other states may exceed certain limits in tax rates.
The exceptions are "measures of urgence" and the items of the annual budget, save such as establish a new tax, increase one in force, or necessitate an issue of bonds. The Referendum cannot be exercised against the budget as a whole, the Grand Council indicating the sections which are to go to public vote. In case of opposition to any measure, a petition for the Referendum is put in circulation.
As the petition did not ask for a special election the Governor sent out a proclamation for the referendum to be submitted at the next general election Sept. 13, 1920. The Federal Suffrage Amendment was declared to be adopted on August 26 but there was no way in which the referendum could legally be omitted from the ballot.
The principle sometimes extended to cities, Berne, for instance, in the fifty-five years from 1469 to 1524, taking sixty referendary votings. The other source was in the vote taken by the ancient cantons on any action by their delegates to the federal Diet, or congress, these delegates undertaking no affair except on condition of referring it to the cantonal councils ad referendum.
Assemblyman J. A. Denton of Lincoln county secured a hearing before the Committee of the Whole on February 20 and a large lobby from the society was present. Mrs. Stanislawsky and Miss Cohn addressed the committee, emphasizing the fact that each of the political parties had declared in its State platform for this referendum and all the women asked was to have the question sent to the voters.
The counterpart of the demand for larger governmental activity was a call for the greater participation of the people in the operation of the machinery of legislation. This lay back of the demand for the initiative, the referendum, and the popular election of senators.
That the Liberals were justified, by all the rules of the party game, in treating the result of that election as, for all political and Parliamentary purposes, a direct indorsement of their proposals, may be freely granted. It was as near an approach to an ad hoc Referendum as we are ever likely to get under our present system.
"Failing in this effort, the resolution was formed that the only other method lay in submitting the matter in a solemn referendum to the conscience of America. In that great judgment we now are. Men are but instrumentalities of the Divine Will, worked out, we pray, in the nations.
During 1914, 1915 and 1916 Dr. Gordon sent a letter to the councils of the other cities, towns, villages and rural communities asking them to hold a referendum or to pass a resolution in favor of this extension and send it to the Government. The letters were followed by a successful campaign in the municipalities by the society.
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