near to accomplishment as it did in the twenty years preceding the Civil War.  Then, also, there was during the same decades a great increase in personal property; that is to say, in corporate stocks and bonds, the kind of property most easily attacked by legislation; but the very possession of such securities by large numbers of the people tended to make them more conservative in ordinary property matters.  It is in the times when you have but farmers on the one side, as in the Shay Rebellion in Massachusetts after the Revolution, or when the proletariat on the one side is opposed to the bourgeoisie on the other, as in certain Continental countries, that you find radical legislation.  We were fortunate in that a large number of our citizens were thus arrayed on both sides of the question.  Property rights, of course, have been granted to women most completely throughout the Union, but in twenty years they have made little progress toward the vote.

Blackstone says that democracy is peculiarly fitted to the making of laws, and calls attention to the importance of legislation, with the regret that there should be no other state of life, arts, or science, in which no preliminary instruction is looked upon as requisite; but by “democracy” Blackstone really meant representative government, which still acts quite differently from the referendum and the initiative.  Democracies, he says, are usually the best calculated to direct the end of a law.  But in no sense, says Professor Jenks, was the British Parliament the result of a democracy; while our State legislatures during the Revolution were, indeed, democratic, and practically omnipotent, and for that very reason were promptly curbed by the State constitutions, which were adopted even before the Federal.  And of late the distrust of our legislatures is shown by the most exaggerated list of restrictions we find placed upon them in the newer constitutions of the Southern and Western States.  Another thing Blackstone oddly says, is that in legislation by the people they will show great caution in making new laws that may interfere with their rights and liberties.  Precisely the contrary is experienced.  Nobody is so willing to interfere with the rights or liberties of the people as the people themselves, or their supposed representatives in the legislature; and a body or faction of the people is far more ready and reckless to impose its will upon the others than have been the most masterful English monarchs.

The recklessness of legislatures has two or three most evil consequences.  They pass foolish or unconstitutional laws, relying on the governor to veto them, or the courts to declare them void—­which has the effect of shirking their responsibility and imposing unjust and obnoxious duties on the other branches of government, to which they do not fairly belong; increases the growing disrespect for all law, and deteriorates the moral and intellectual fibre of the legislature itself.  Finally, also, it provokes that hypertrophic modern State constitution of the South and West, which tries to bind down future legislatures in infinite particulars, thereby again diminishing their importance and responsibility, making it more difficult to get able men to serve in them, and, by the frequent necessary amendment of State constitutions, resulting in a continual referendum, which nearly does away with representative government itself.