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Updated: May 13, 2025
At the time of the destruction of the Monarchy of Charles I, the Army of the Commonwealth, a very democratic body, actually demanded the Referendum, or Poll of the People, for all important changes in the Constitution.
Mrs. Ellington, president of the State Suffrage Association, explained to them that it had entered into an agreement with all other State associations at the last national suffrage convention not to go into a referendum campaign without the consent of the National Board, if they expected financial assistance from that organization, and the resolution was withdrawn.
When you see the West adopting or urging such measures as presidential primaries, the election of United States Senators by popular vote, the initiative, the referendum and the recall as means supplementary to representative government, you shudder in your dignified way no doubt, at the audacity and irreverence of your crude countrymen.
In each of our forty eight States different codes are showing their relative advantages; here woman's suffrage is on trial, there the initiative and referendum, there the recall. Almost every sort of possible marriage law, it would seem, is being tried somewhere. It is a time of moral confusion, of the unsettling of old conceptions and a groping, stumbling progress toward the new.
The second step is lawmaking by the representative legislature, congress, or parliament, usually after previous deliberation and recommendation by a committee; in some states the people have the right by referendum to ratify or reject the legislation, and even to initiate such legislation as they desire. The third step is the arrangement for carrying out the law that has been passed.
He should know how far representative legislative bodies can be trusted to express the will of the people; and he should have studied the working of the initiative and the referendum. It is also desirable that he should know the theory of two chambers, and should have ideas as to how the members of the second chamber, if there is to be one, should be chosen.
The Initiative and Compulsory Referendum are attempts to cure the evils which have developed in our practice of representative government by means of a return to the old, unsuccessful, and discarded method of direct legislation and by rehabilitating one of the most impracticable of Rousseau's theories.
But most of us know and are deeply interested. Why? Because we have felt that in too many instances our government did not represent us, and we have said: "We have got to have a key to the door of our own house. The initiative and referendum and the recall afford such a key to our own premises.
Every election was, in its last analysis, a solemn referendum upon the question as to which corporate interest should control legislation whether the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose master mind was the Republican leader of the state, United States Senator Sewall, or the Public Service interests, whose votaries and friends were Senator Smith of New Jersey, and Milan Ross, Sr., of Middlesex County.
The advance of the Referendum in this great union has been very gradual. It began in 1877 with voting on constitutional amendments. The most recent, and perhaps last possible, step was to transfer the election of the general executive board from the annual convention to the entire body.
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