agement of an estate rather than the heritage of the people. The building of roads, the construction of canals, the improvement of natural harbors and water courses, the protection of the forests from wanton destruction, the impounding of waters that otherwise would run to waste carrying destruction with them in seasonal floods, the maintenance of technical schools, and laboratories for scientific experiment, the conversion of arid wastes into fruitful fields by irrigation, the opening of hitherto inaccessible areas by the introduction of railroads and telegraphs are some of the legitimate undertakings of a conservative government. What could be less conservative than the policy America has pursued under the representative system in regard to the great network of national highways now under private control? By its prodigality and recklessness in regard to the railroads, it not only has encouraged premature and wasteful investments, it not only has loaned prerogatives of sovereignty to private use, it not only has permitted corporations organized for profit to manipulate the growth of cities and the distribution of population, but it has nurtured in the bosom of the state a rival authority so large and powerful that it can be resubdued only by tremendous effort and at great expense extending over a long period of years, perhaps only in the end by the repurchase of the prerogatives conferred upon it and the immense property it has built up.

It is a mistake to regard the men who organize a trust and extort for their services a fifty-million-dollar fee from the industry which the trust controls as conservative men. The vaulting ambitions, the daring

schemes, the ruthless methods of our financial overlords are not conservative. These men are the reckless radicals who, unless restrained in time, will bring the state to ruin. Majority Rule, the effective expression of the deliberate will of the whole people, untrammeled by constitutional prohibitions or by judicial ultimatums, stands forth the palladium of liberty, the bulwark of true conservatism, the guaranty of the stability of the state, the best possible assurance of the protection of property against the assaults of the madmen of high finance who would transform social wealth into a personal possession and turn the producers of wealth as beggars into the street.

CHAPTER XXXIX

MAJORITY RULE IN GREAT CITIES

MANY men who favor the establishment of Majority Rule in the governments of states and cities generally, are afraid that it would not work well in a great metropolis like New York or Chicago. They believe that the American people in most of their political subdivisions are well qualified for self-government, but that an exception must be made with regard to a few cities where the peculiar characteristics of urban life are sharply accentuated. In the great cities the contrasts between the few who have great riches and the many who have little or nothing are most pronounced. Here also are the babel of tongues, the inequality of political experience, the heterogeneous customs. Moreover, metropolitan populations are favorably situated for responding quickly to the passionate appeals of the press. The volatile nature of metropolitan life, the unstable character of the population, the absorption of the people in superficial and momentary interests, seem to make conditions out of which political disorder naturally springs. No doubt these conditions all have a bearing upon the fitness of metropolitan populations for selfgovernment, but in so far as their special circumstances and characteristics make Majority Rule unsafe they also militate against the success of representative in

stitutions. Accordingly, it is not so much the adaptability of the Initiative, the Referendum and the Recall to the conditions of large cities that we have to consider as it is the adaptability of democracy itself to these communities. If the theory of this book is correct, the alleged dangers of Majority Rule in great cities are additional proofs of their need of it, if perchance thereby democracy itself may be saved to them.

Take, for example, the extreme disparity of wealth in great cities, and the segregation of the people into different residence districts according to differences in their social status. Here we have conditions that are hostile to democratic institutions. The masses of the people have no keen interest in the preservation of their poverty, and so they do not require proof before permitting change. Their impecunious condition is made more unbearable by the immediate proximity of flaunted riches. Envy, hatred, and willingness to strike reckless blows at the existing order are a natural result. The patriotism that attaches to citizenship where it enjoys the obvious benefits of free government is deadened in the breasts of people who think they have nothing to lose from the overturning of existing institutions, and perhaps something to gain. Where vice is a commercialized pursuit, where congested poverty submerges a large percentage of the people, where humiliation whispers to discontent and irresponsibility promises immunity to crime, there is reason to fear the unrestrained authority of the populace. But we must not confuse the issue. These dangerous conditions are proofs that radical measures are necessary. Democracy does not for a moment ad

mit that the abuses of life prevalent in great cities are normal and to be tolerated permanently. Democracy would be untrue to itself if it did not purpose to lay a strong hand upon the cities and to uproot the upas trees that poison their social atmosphere. The conditions of urban life which are said to make Majority Rule dangerous are themselves deadly. They cannot be long endured. If Majority Rule would remove them, even at terrible cost, it would prove itself a beneficent instrument for the ultimate salvation of the state. The fear that Majority Rule would prove to be a radical upsetting force in cities should be a hope instead of a fear. Cities need to be upset. Who of all the staunchest defenders of property rights, who that is most content with the established order, who that is proudest of our national and civic achievements, dares say aloud or even whisper in his inmost soul that these monstrous and horrible aspects of urban civilization, the very aspects against which enraged democracy would be most likely to fling itself, ought to be preserved?

In the great cities, also, there is the confusion of tongues that results from the mingling of numberless nations. In New York and Chicago and many other American cities the people whose parents were native to the United States constitute a small minority of the entire population. Germans, Irishmen, Jews, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Greeks, join to make cosmopolitan communities where diversity of customs and inequality of political experience tend to unfit the people for governmental coöperation. A great American city, in large measure, consists of a federation of alien colonies, bound together, so far as they are consciously united