Wisdom of the Fathers

(From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reprinted in The Waco Times Herald, February 26, 1925)

The initiative and referendum, the direct primary, for example, along with the proposed recall of judicial decisions which was sponsored by the high authority of a gentleman who had been President of the United States!
Those are, indeed, the processes of simon-pure democracy.
They are frank—yes, contemptuous—disavowals of the efficacy of our representative system.
That they have failed in the test of actual operation cannot intelligently be questioned.
But the forces of agitation that engineered their adoption persist in their devotion to these experiments and, with fury and personal abuse, resist any effort to modify them and return to the old representative method.

There is no kinship whatever between these experiments and the Wadsworth proposal.
The Wadsworth proposal is not an innovation.
It is not a departure from any mandate of the Founding Fathers.
The states, from the first, have submitted constitutional questions to the people.
Constitutional conventions meet and draft charters, but those drafts have to be ratified by the people before they become the organic law of the states.
All amendments to state constitutions are submitted to the people.
The people have never delegated to any representative body the authority to write or edit the fundamental law of the states.
The first draft of the Federal Constitution was itself a scrap of paper until vitalized by a convention of the states.
And the price of that voucher was the immortal Bill of Rights, which stands as the people’s contribution to constitutional government as conceived and perfected by American democracy.

The years attest the wisdom of the Founding Fathers—attest their inspired political prescience.
The Fathers recognized that there was a limit to the people’s capacity for bearing political burdens.
They understood that the technical business of government would have to be delegated to men specially equipped and willing to transact it.
If the people were to work out their economic and cultural salvation, they had to have time to do it.
Economic salvation, with all that implies, was the people’s profession.
They could not successfully practice that profession and at the same time practice the profession of politics.
The making of laws was entrusted to representatives.
The representative form of government was simply a common-sense plan of operation.

But the fundamental law—the Constitution—was not statutory law as conceived by the Fathers.
It was never their idea that we should legislate by Constitution.
The Constitution was fundamental.
It expressed the principles of our government.
It certified definitely the rights of the citizens.
It limited rigidly the powers of the Government.
On constitutional questions, then, which from their nature would seldom arise, the people could speak competently and assuredly should speak.

The Wadsworth proposal to referendum amendments to the Federal Constitution to the vote of the people is the national application of a tried and proved practice of the states.
In addition, it has the sanction of profound historical precedent.