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Updated: May 13, 2025
The West, which had gone to greatest extremes in framing new state constitutions, was also the testing-ground for the initiative, referendum and recall. The first of these devices the initiative is a plan by which a specified percentage of the voters may initiate legislation that is, propose a law and require the officials of the state to submit it to the electorate.
The initiative, referendum, recall, and the withholding of important subjects from the legislature's power, are among the devices intended to free the people from the machinations of their wilful representatives. Now, most of the evils which these heroic measures have sought to remedy can be traced directly to the partizan ownership of the state legislature.
A steady pressure maintained through the two national parties will ensure the recognition of all just demands; such extreme and ill-considered demands as that for the initiative and national referendum can only provoke opposition and cause reaction. Even those who sympathize with the ultimate objects of the Labour unions must see the folly of their present unpatriotic and suicidal tactics.
And therefore I, for one, will not allow any man who knows his history to say to me that I am acting inconsistently with either the spirit or the essential form of the American government in advocating the direct election of United States Senators. Take another matter. Take the matter of the initiative and referendum, and the recall.
Des Moines, Iowa, added to the Galveston plan the initiative, the referendum, and the recall, put in force a merit system for subordinate officials, and adopted the non-partisan open primary.
Where the cantonal Referendum is optional, a successful petition for it frequently secures a rejection of the law called in question. In 1862 and again in 1878, the canton of Geneva rejected proposed changes in its constitution, on the latter occasion by a majority of 6,000 in a vote of 11,000.
This is obviously a dangerous and double-edged weapon, the adoption of which by other sections of the community the Army and Navy, for instance, or the medical profession might mean national dissolution. Another method is the Referendum, by which important decisions adopted by parliament would be referred to a direct popular vote.
This controversy was at its height in the press and in the public mind when President Wilson sent the following message, through a New York State suffrage leader, on behalf of the approaching New York referendum on state woman suffrage: "May I not express to you my very deep interest in the campaign in New York for the adoption of woman suffrage, and may I not say that I hope no voter will be influenced in his decision with regard to the great matter by anything the so-called pickets may have done here in Washington.
In the first year of his administration he combated an attempt to annul the workmen's compensation law by an improper referendum and vigorously cleaned up the situation by causing the arrest of those who had conspired to falsify names to petitions.
On the other hand, "Wytown should adopt a commission government on the Des Moines plan," would not be a double proposition, though this plan includes the initiative and referendum; for the proposition makes the issue that the plan should be adopted or rejected as a whole. In some cases a proposition may be grammatically compound, and yet carry a single assertion.
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