by the date of the adjournment of the legislature or the date of the passage of the measure involved in the petitions, without any reference to registration or election dates. Moreover, the function of the Referendum being conservative and obstructive rather than radical and constructive, its use is generally permitted upon the petition of a smaller number of citizens than is required in the case of the Initiative. This number may be fixed as an absolute number or may be reckoned as a percentage of the total number on the basis of the registration or of the most recent balloting. The friends of the Referendum usually think that five per cent of the votes cast at the last election is a large enough proportion of the electorate to be required on Referendum petitions on state issues. On municipal questions a larger percentage is sometimes approved, though there is the same reason for keeping the required percentage down in a big city as in a state, except that the people are nearer together and can be more easily reached in a city than in a state.

The proofs of the signatures and the official verification of the petitions present substantially the same problems in connection with the Referendum as with the Initiative, except that the election and registration officers cannot ordinarily be used in the securing and verification of Referendum signatures.

Before closing this chapter, I should refer briefly to the Advisory Referendum, which is the Referendum in its mildest form. This term is used to describe the process by which the legislative body sometimes takes. the sense of the people on a particular measure or project and then does as it pleases about following the advice

given. This process should be distinguished from the Advisory Initiative under which the people are allowed to give advice without being specifically asked for it. The Advisory Referendum may be useful where a conscientious legislature desires, before formulating a measure in detail, to find out how the people stand in regard to the principle involved.

In discussing the advantages and the disadvantages of the Referendum in the succeeding chapters, I shall assume, except as otherwise stated, that this institution is to take the form of the Optional Referendum applicable generally to legislative acts other than emergency measures, either at the will of the legislative body or upon petitions filed by electors to a number specified in the constitution or charter. Many persons who oppose the Initiative and the Recall are either favorable or indifferent to the Referendum. Such opposition as is directed against the Referendum in particular is mainly based upon two points: first, that the Referendum offers to the legislative body a temptation to shirk its responsibilities, and second, that the Referendum may be used by a minority of the people to interfere with and delay the orderly performance of governmental functions by the regularly constituted authorities. The chief arguments in favor of the Referendum as distinguished from its companion tools of democracy are three: first, that it provides a check upon legislative corruption; second, that it enables the people to prevent legislative improvidence; and third, that it provides a means of keeping legislation in line with public sentiment. These objections and favorable arguments will be considered in the next five chapters.

LEGISLATIVE bodies are admittedly subject to powerful temptations. Individual legislators often have palpitation of the heart when circumstances compel them to go on record. They are like other people who are the prey of conflicting interests and desires. Capital is proverbially timid. Bankers and merchants are known to be cowards on public questions. Politicians are afraid of the cars. Everybody is scared about something. A characteristic weakness of legislators is their unwillingness to take sides openly between the people whose votes are necessary for their reëlection and the corporations whose support is necessary for their renomination and their business prosperity. Such a dilemma spells fear and indecision. Accordingly, it is said, the legislator will take refuge in the Referendum to temporize with his two masters. Or it may be that he is torn asunder by the desire not to offend either of two strong factions among the people themselves. Or it may be that he is simply weak or inexperienced and is unable to make up his own mind about the merits of a measure upon which the people want him to use his own judgment, assuming that a legislator,

whose business it is to study legislative needs, will be more familiar with the demands of justice and public policy in this particular case than they themselves

are.

Here we see three separate states of mind of the legislators which may lead them to welcome the Referendum as a means of avoiding embarrassment and shirking responsibility. Now, when the legislators are really trying to serve two masters, the Interests and the People, by the use of the Referendum they tend to diverge somewhat from a strictly neutral attitude and to squirm out of their secret obligations. The normal result of a nice balance between two conflicting interests is political paralysis, a condition that is very gratifying to those who sigh for governmental "stability" and "to be let alone." Usually, in these days of political unrest and attempted readjustment, it is the special interests and their sympathizers that hold legislative paralysis to be a normal and healthy condition. It is the people at large who clamor for action. Under such circumstances, one can easily see how disgusted the friends of inaction are with legislators who were supposed to have been carefully selected to serve as a bulwark against the assaults of the radicals upon existing institutions, when these same legislators, instead of standing up like men and advising their constituents firmly that no attacks on property or the established order will be permitted, lose their nerve and throw the responsibility for action upon the people. Verily, such legislators are unworthy of the rewards intended for them. What is the use of spending vast sums of good stand-pat money in maintaining the

political organizations to nominate and elect safe men to the legislature, if in spite of everything they become weak-kneed at last and yield the fortress to the foe? Alas, weakness does not excuse ingratitude, that most dangerous of all qualities in the beneficiaries of political influence. Yet, from the standpoint of the people there is something to be said for an institution that undermines the courage of legislators, when it is their courage to go wrong that topples over. The principles involved are the same when the position of the parties is reversed so that the people desire to maintain the existing status while the special interests demand action for their own relief or for the enlargement of their privileges. In this case the legislators may attach a referendum to the proposed measure as a concession to popular opposition, and thus, without actually refusing to confer the benefits sought by the special interests, tack on a condition that may make their action nugatory. Then the people have a sort of grateful feeling for having been permitted to triumph over the inclinations of their legislative servants, and forget to be angry with them for their primary failure to resist the demands of those who would prostitute government to the service of private interests. But under these circumstances the disgust and rage of these interests exceed, if anything, what they feel when the legislature yields to the pressure of public opinion for progressive legislation. This difference is easily explained. New legislation may be evaded in practice or it may be overthrown in the courts. At any rate, in the enactment of unfavorable measures by the legislature, the special interests feel that they have merely lost the first skirm