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Updated: June 26, 2025
The initiative is a means of seeing to it that measures which the people want shall be passed, when legislatures defy or ignore public opinion. The referendum is a means of seeing to it that the unrepresentative measures which they do not want shall not be placed upon the statute book.
Millions of men and women are thus taxable in respect of their living-costs at the caprice of handfuls of men appointed to do for a shifty Government what it is afraid to do for itself. It is a vain thing to have secured by statute that the House of Commons shall be the sole authority in matters of taxation, if the House of Commons basely delegates its powers to unrepresentative men.
And in the second place, it is believed to perform very inefficiently its primary function of criticising and controlling the action of Government. First of all, why do men vaguely feel that the House of Commons is unrepresentative? I think there are three main reasons. The first is to be found in the method of election.
But history affords many instances of how assemblies constituted in what seems to be the most unsatisfactory way possible, have been remarkable for the ability and patriotism they have shown; and certainly this was the case with that unrepresentative collection of Protestant landlords, Dublin barristers, and paid officials, who composed the Irish Parliament.
Lloyd George's House of Commons, which owed its existence to past events and to a passing mood, soon forfeited the confidence of a fickle public, and the impotence to which it was reduced left the country prone to the temptations and a prey to the turbulence of direct and unrepresentative action.
If America is getting a little more than usual of it, at present, that is nothing to get excited about. In the face of such sentiments, cheerily and forcibly expressed, the average gossip and fault-finder is usually willing to acquiesce with a shrug. And so the discussion ends with a feeling that an attempt has been made to exaggerate the importance of a restricted and unrepresentative class.
To have reached a final philosophy would be only to have formulated the typical and satisfying form of human apperception; the view would remain a theory, an instrument of comprehension and survey fitted to the human eye; it would be for ever utterly heterogeneous from fact, utterly unrepresentative of any of those experiences which it would artificially connect and weave into a pattern.
They thunder conclusions without remembering the premisses, and expose their precepts, daily, of course, grown more thin and unrepresentative, to the aversion and neglect of all who genuinely love what is good.
One of the first steps necessary to restore harmony must be reform of the Upper House by a gradual extension of the franchise and a lowering of the qualification, so as to ensure that elections are freely contested; it is its present unrepresentative character which gives force to the appeals of the radical press and intensifies class divisions.
A cynic might say that the people can't go far wrong in politics because they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents in the interest of a mediocre regularity.
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