language of prohibition. Never let the law whisper sanction or money consideration for the selling of liquor as a beverage.-The Voice. This is 51. In 1892 the Democrats, with 47.2 per cent. of the vote, got 59.8 per cent, of the Congressmen; and in 1894 the Republicans, with 48.1 per cent. of the vote, elected 68.8 per cent. of the congressmen. shown by Proportional Representation Review, Chicago, December, 1894. Because the majority ought to prevail over the minority, must the majority have all the votes, the minority none? Is it necessary that the minority should not even be heard? Nothing but habit and old association can reconcile any reasonable being to the needless injustice. -John Stuart Mill, Considerations of Representative Government, quoted, Socialism of John Stuart Mill, p. 138. See also p. 151. The key to social reform is some effective kind of minority or proportional representation.-Commons, Social Reform and the Church, 85.-In the California Congressional election in 1894 the Republicans had 110,442 votes; the Democrats, 87,768; the Populists, 55,289; the Prohibitionists, 7346. Yet the Republicans have six congressmen; the Democrats, one; the Populists and Prohibitionists, none-that is, the 110,542 Republican voters have six times as much representation in Congress as the other 150,503 voters of the other parties of the State. There is no justice in such a system.-The Pilot, Nashville, Tenn. 52. Read Direct Legislation, by J. W. Sullivan, Humboldt Publishing Co., New York, 25c. Also send for circulars to Direct Legislation League, Box 1216, New York.-One of the chief advantages of the referendum and initiative is that they would teach Americans to discuss measures more and men less. Our politics has an unfortunate tendency to become merely personal what American slang expressively designates as " peanut politics."—Ely, Socialism, etc., 346. The Imperative Mandate is another provision whereby the constituents of any legislator, finding that he is not faithfully representing them, may recall him before his term of office expires and elect another representative in his place. This the author does not approve. It substitutes delegation for representation (see Flint's Socialism, 303) and makes the legislator a mere bulletin-board for his constituency. It leaves no time to test the wisdom of any act in which he differs from the momentary sentiment of his constituents, who set him apart, in the division of labor, to think on politics more thoroughly than others have time to do. 53. The usual form is to forbid it "except " as a monopoly of the race-tracks, disguising this permission under seeming prohibition. The following law, passed by Congress during the Harrison administration, is a sample: An Act to Prevent Book-making and Pool-selling in the District of Columbia. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That it shall be unlawful for any person or association of persons in the cities of Washington and Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, or within said District within one mile of the boundaries of said cities, to bet, gamble, or make books or pools on the result of any trotting race or running race of horses, or boat race, or race of any kind, or on any election or any contest of any kind, or game of baseball. Sect. 2. That any person or association of persons violating the provisions of this act shall be fined not exceeding five hundred dollars, or be imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both, at the discretion of the court. Approved March 2, 1891. 54. Mr. William T. Stead tells a story of a reformed man who testified in a noonday prayer meeting in Chicago: "All my life I have been devoted to whisky and politics. Now, thanks be to God for his redeeming mercy, I am delivered from both." It is not the desertion of politics, however, but its conversion that a wise convert will propose. 55. It is an omen of evil that, except in ritualistic churches, prayers for the President, Governor, mayor, are few, fewer, fewest, respectively, even in the pulpit, and almost unheard of in prayer meeting or home worship. 56. Petitions, letters, personal interviews are good, better, best. As to petitions the old method of petitioning by miscellaneous signatures, obtained hastily at the door and on the street, is not only slower, but more likely to result in mistakes than the new method, by deliberate vote, after explanation and discussion, in citizens' meetings, labor lodges, and church associations. These indorsements of organizations also show, by the name of the organization, just what sort of people are favoring the movement. Write to National Bureau of Reforms for information as to proposed reform legislation, national and State, in behalf of which petitions, letters, and lobbying are needed. Since the lectures were delivered, the Secretary of Agriculture has abolished the free distribution of seeds. Let us hope that the correspondents of congressmen will now find time to write them about social reforms, which are the seeds of national prosperity. 57. Men upon each line were brought sharply face to face with the fact that in questions as to wages, rules, etc., each line was supported by twenty-four combined railroads [before the Chicago strike]. . . An extension of this association . . . and the proposed legalization of "pooling" would result in an aggregation of power and capital dangerous to the people and their liberties as well as to employees and their rights... Should continued combinations and consolidations result in half a dozen or less ownerships of our railroads within a few years, the question of government ownership will be forced to the front, and we need to be ready to dispose of it intelligently.-United States Strike Commission Report, 26, 27-28. So great has become the importance of transportation in our day that the control of it by a monopoly is the most far-reaching tyranny now made possible by our economic life.-Ely, Outlines of Economics, 61. On injustice and cruelty of railways, see also pp. 60, 65, for instance, seven thousand employees killed in 1892 chiefly through lack of safety appliances. 58. The marshaling of industries in companies and battalions is to bring with it a subordination of men to men, of the many to the few, more complete than has ever prevailed since feudalism.-President E. B. Andrews, Wealth and Moral Law, 40. The dangerous classes politically are the very rich and the very poor.-Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 307. As this book goes to press, one of the burning questions of social reform is the " department store," against whose underselling in books, groceries, etc., the smaller tradesmen are protesting, and seeking to turn combination back to competition. All such efforts are against nature. The evils of combination can only be cured by crowding it forward into cooperation. That is the meaning of antimonopoly in these pages, and is the only anti-monopoly for which there is either reason or hope. 59. To those who challenge our right to make Sabbath laws we reply that, to a republic, they are laws of self-preservation, as consistent with liberty, nay, more, as essential to it as any other laws to prevent bribery, ignorance, the corruption of the home, the overwork of the toilers, the freedom of worship. Good Health, a periodical of the Seventh-day Adventists, the chief opponents of Sabbath laws, speaking of another evil than Sabbath-breaking, said: "The great sin-suppressing force of civilization is the civil law, and always will be so long as men build their characters on so low a plane that fear of punishment rather than the love of what is good and best and truest, the love of right itself, is the restraining motive." The context shows that by "sin" the writer means wrongs to man, and so reading the sentence, it is an unconscious admission of exactly what advocates of Sabbath laws claim as to their relation to immorality. To protect health, to prevent crime, to promote intelligence and morality, to punish wrongs to man, the State protects the Sabbath as a day of freedom for worship and from work, save works of necessity and mercy, and private work by those who observe . another day. A republic cannot endure without morality, nor morality without religion, nor religion without the Sabbath, nor the Sabbath without law. More satisfactory results wait on the development of a non-partisan city "machine" as complete and effective as is possessed by the corrupt city leaders of the national parties. Till then, if Christian citizens are to make themselves effective in the primary, it would seem to be necessary that they should have a pre-primary to agree upon some course of action. The stay-at-home voters in the elections of 1894 in the United States numbered five and a quarter millions, most of them, no doubt, persons who, having stayed at home on the night of the primaries, thought the candidate nominated unworthy of their suffrage. |