There is, however, an intelligent tendency, notably in the South, to recognize the right of women to vote as property owners upon matters involving the levying of taxes, or the “bonding” of cities, towns, or counties, for public improvements or other purposes.  Such laws exist in Texas, Louisiana, Michigan, and possibly other States, and in Louisiana the statute provides machinery by which women may on such matters vote by mail.  It is much to be wished that municipal affairs and municipal elections could be separated entirely from political ones.  That is to say, that a city or town might be run as a business corporation on its business side, and in such elections have the property owners, both men and women, only vote.  The trouble, of course, is that there are certain matters, notably the expenditure for schools, which is the largest, at least in Massachusetts cities and towns, which are in a sense both municipal and political, both economic and affecting individual rights of persons not property owners.  In any case, the matter must be considered outside of the sphere of “practical politics.”  It is hardly likely that, except for some special matter like the race question in the South, a State constitution will ever be amended in a conservative direction.  Allied with this would be a proposition to deprive persons in receipt of wages or salary from a city of the vote at municipal elections.  Laborers and employees in the employ of a large city like Boston already form a very considerable percentage of the voters, and if you add to them the employees on the public-service corporations, partly under municipal control, you have probably got nearly one-third of the total vote.  Yet the vote could not be taken from them without an amendment to the State constitution.

Of the initiative and referendum much has been written.  It exists in full force, that is to say, as applying both to State elections and to county, city, or town elections, in several States, mostly in the far West; and for partial purposes it exists in several more.  “Direct legislation” has been very popular as a political slogan during the past few years, but it has not been adopted as yet in any of the thirteen original States.  The objections to it are fundamentally that it destroys the principle of representative government; that it takes responsibility from the legislature with the result, probably, of getting a more and more inferior type of man as State representative; that it is unnecessary, inasmuch as any one may have any bill introduced in the legislature to-day, and public sentiment be effectual to prevent the bill from being defeated; and finally, the objection of inconvenience, that it is cumbrous and unmanageable to work.  Already the Secretary of State of Oregon complains that the laws passed by initiative are so badly written as to be unintelligible and conflicting, to say nothing of bad spelling and grammar.  In one instance, at least, an important statute, that for the initiative