Mr. PRESIDENT: During my service of more than twenty-one years in the two Houses of Congress I have never before delivered an address in either of them intended more for the country at large than for the body itself, and I would not now depart from a rule which I have followed so long and which commends itself so fully to my judgment except for the extraordinary situation in which we find ourselves with respect to the questions embraced in the pending resolution.

For several years the advocates of the initiative and referendum have conducted a campaign in their behalf with an industry and a zeal unparalleled in American politics. They have used the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD to disseminate their arguments, and not content with the number or the kind of readers whom they could reach through that publication, they have printed what they desired to circulate as separate documents, which they have sent into more than three million homes. They have filled every newspaper and magazine whose columns were open to them with their appeals; and from every lecture platform in the land they have urged those proposals as the true and the only remedy for the industrial and political evils which afflict our age and country.

On the other hand, the men who are opposed to the initiative and referendum have made no special effort to combat them. They have, it is true, protested from time to time with some degree of earnestness, but they have not followed their words with either the work or the organization calculated to achieve results, and in more than one instance they have suffered those cumbersome and illogical legislative methods adopted almost without resistance. An examination of the returns will show that those miscalled "reforms" have been incorporated into the organic law of several States by votes which did not represent twenty-five per cent of the qualified electors in those States, for the simple reason that no adequate attempt was made to instruct the people and bring them to the polls.

This remarkable condition has been due to different influences operating on the minds of different classes. Many of our most intelligent and successful business men are always so engrossed with the management of their private affairs that they often neglect, I regret to say, the performance of their highest duty to the public, and they have not up to this time taken any part in this contest. A still larger, and an equally intelligent, number of our people have treated it all as a transient distemper of the public mind, and expecting that it would soon pass away they have permitted the propaganda to proceed unchallenged.

With these numerous and intelligent citizens inactive and apparently indifferent, many ambitious politicians have concluded that by an advocacy of those measures they could win official preferment and accordingly have joined in the noisy demand for their adoption.

Thus, Mr. President, these innovations have acquired a false appearance of strength, and that false appearance of strength has attracted the support of many who do not understand them and who will reverse their positions when they are made to understand them. But, sir, if the men who believe in a written Constitution and in the principles of a representative democracy do not meet this question courageously and discuss it before the people, we will soon reach the time when a discussion can not produce its proper effect. Personally, I have not been delinquent in this matter, for on every suitable occasion I have endeavored to expose, to the best of my ability, the dangers of this new political evangel; and yet, sir, I would feel that I had left something undone, if I did not, before retiring from the Senate, leave upon our record a fuller statement of the argument than I have heretofore found an opportunity to make.

When I drew the resolution to which I am speaking I limited it to the single proposition that the initiative and referendum are repugnant to the principles upon which this Government was founded; and I so limited it because I feared that the business of the Senate would not permit me to occupy more of its time than would be required to establish that proposition. I perfectly understood, of course, that the work which I had thus laid out for myself, no matter how thoroughly I might do it, would dispose of only one-half of the question; and the more I have considered it the more I have become convinced that, even at the risk of unduly taxing the patience of the Senate, I ought to go further and demonstrate also, if I can, that this Government, as established by our fathers, is a better government than that which the initiative and referendum would establish. And to that double task I shall now apply myself.

In the convention which framed our Constitution some delegates believed that a limited monarchy was the best government which the wisdom of men could devise, and the greatest intellect in that memorable body was one of that number; other delegates preferred an aristocracy, and among them were men of exalted character and unselfish patriotism; still other delegates and I rejoice to say they composed an overwhelming majority-demanded a representative democracy; but among all of those illustrious patriots and statesmen there was not one who seriously contended for a direct democracy. That our fathers deliberately, and after great consideration, chose a representative democracy as the government best calculated to secure the liberties and promote the happiness of the people can be established by such an abundance of historical evidence that my difficulty has been to select from the mass of it sufficient to answer my purpose without unnecessarily consuming the time of the Senate. Fortunately, too, this evidence does not come from any one school of political thought, but men who held the most opposite opinions upon other questions were at perfect agreement on this. Here Hamilton and Madison occupied common ground; here Patterson and Pinckney, each the author of