A SOVEREIGN PEOPLE.*

Mn. HENRY DEILLREST LLOYD was an American, and an advanced reformer with a Socialistic bias, who had collected the material for a work on Switzerland when he died. He

had already written on the experimental legislation of New Zealand, and everything he wrote showed him to be a man of

earnest thought, with a happy knack of expressing himself

neatly and graphically. His rough notes on Switzerland have been expanded into this book by Mr. J. A. Hobson. It had been Mr. Lloyd's intention to call his book "The Sovereign People," no doubt borrowing the phrase from Freeman, who applied it to the Swiss. At all events, what he meant his work to convey was that under Swiss institutions the people

really are the direct rulers, and that the same thing cannot be said of nations which have representative rule, like the

United States, France, and Britain. With the aspirations which Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Hobson make the Swiss models serve we have little common ground, and we would go further and say that Mr. Hobson's frame of mind provokes us to think that we and he could never agree in this world. Towards the end of the book he writes : "Happy Switzer- land! It has no coast, no navy, no colonies, no empire, no masses, no new wealth and very little old wealth, no trusts and no departmental stores"; and again: "It has no policy of territorial expansion to waste the energy and to corrupt the character of its people, and no great speculative sources of wealth to strangle honest industry." We ourselvea would rather have no Empire at all than use it as an instrument of corruption and meanness ; but to shun the ideal of doing great good through the possession of great opportunities, because thereby one may also shun all the temptations to corruption, is a principle of national monasticism which we must call odious. We object strongly to such sloth—for that is what Mr. Hobson's ideal amounts to, though he may not think so—being paraded as the only way of righteousness. We note that in this book the Swiss Army—perhaps the most characteristic of all Swiss institutions—is not mentioned. We do not complain, but we imagine we cannot be wrong in assuming that the omission in a book which treats rather fully of the economics of labour is tobe taken as an admission that the short compulsory military- training does not affect the conditions of labour in any unfavourable sense worth mentioning.

Although Mr. Hobson's habit of mind is antipathetic to ours, there is much of the greatest value and importance in this work. In fact, we have never come across a work of its size- on Switzerland better worth reading. It is impossible to- examine here all the points discussed, but we naturally choose- for mention the Referendum and the Initiative. The objec- tion to the Referendum in Britain lies in a belief that the

function of choosing rightly Members of Parliament, and the function of discriminating between the measures passed by

those Members, cannot be vested in the same persons. The two functions are regarded as somehow inherently different, and it is held that when once the power to legislate has been put in. the hands of the people's representative the people themselves. cannot properly have the fruits of legislation referred back to- them. This objection seems to us fanciful, and even sophis- tical. However the logic may be evaded, the argument really means that "trust in the people," which is ardently professed- by many of the objectors, is imperfect. Although most. advanced Liberals in Britain will not look at the Referendum,. which is the only simple and logical solution of the difficulty between the two Houses of Parliament, we have observed with. pleasure that the principle is accepted by the most able- Liberal paper, the Manchester Guardian, where Mr. Hobson has written in support of it. Of course, if it be argued that

the Referendum is conservative in force, and that that is the- reat objection, there is no more to be said, except that the- principle of democracy means nothing if it is only to be het& just when it introduces experimental legislation. Mr. Hobson- finds that there is a residual tendency to conservatism in the- operation of the Swiss Referendum, and he explains that such.

as it is, it is partly due to a very human trait,—when an obscure- person votes "No," he is asserting his power; but when he- votes "Yes," he is only merging his opinion in that of his leaders. As for the criticism that the Referendum is purely

• The Swiss Den ocracy the Study of a Sovereign People. By Henry Demsreek Lloyd. Edited by John A. Hobson. London: T. Fisher Unwin. [Os. net.]

destructive, Mr. Hobson makes the following perfectly satisfactory answer ;—

" But there is another explanation of the discrepancy in the proportion of acceptances and rejections among laws and constitu- tional amendments respectively. The referendum in the latter is obligatory, but in the former facultative. This means, of course, that only those laws and decrees are submitted to a referendum which have evoked the opposition of a substantial body of citizens who conceive it possible that they may win the majority of the electorate to their view. It is evident that this consideration completely disposes of the notion that the people is proved to be hostile to progressive legislation by the fact that they reject more laws than they accept. Of course they do, for only those laws which are likely to be rejected are put to the rote. In point of fact, since 1874 no less than 246 laws and resolutions have been passed by the Federal Assembly, all of which might have been put to the people, if the opposition to them had been strong enough to secure the qualifying number for the demand, and keen enough to press it to a vote. Where no referendum was demanded it must be assumed that the people silently endorsed the act of their Federal Legislature, and that out of the total number of 246 laws and resolutions only 19 met with their disapproval."

The " Initiative " gives the people the power to propose their own legislation, and thus virtually legislate over the heads of their representatives. It provides that any citizen who desires to propose a law, and can get the assent of enough of his fellow-citizens, can compel the Assembly to consider his draft, report upon it, and finally submit it to the Referendum. The whole nation is decreed a vast Legislative Assembly. On the working of the Initiative Mr. Hobson says :—

" It seems unlikely that the formulated initiative, either for a constitutional amendment or for a law, would be put to frequent use, for if a 'cause' is strong enough to advance by this legisla- tive path, it is unlikely to be so destitute of friends inside the Assembly that it cannot obtain attention in the ordinary way."

We must commend the reader to the book for Mr. Hobson's account of Swiss labour legislation. But we may remark in passing that New Zealand cannot be quoted unreservedly as a country where strikes are unknown. In a country where compulsory arbitration in labour disputes is provided strikes necessarily become a penal offence, and can be punished by fines or imprisonment. In New Zealand there was a strike only the other day. and at this moment the Blackball miners are defying the authorities, who call upon them to pay the fines for their offence.

The application of Swiss examples to Britain is vitiated in commercial respects by the vast difference between the two sets of conditions. Where the Swiss nationalisation of rail- ways and monopolising of the spirit trade involved millions, the same acts in Britain would involve hundreds of millions.

Is it pretended that the State could run the British railways, which notoriously do not pay high dividends, more cheaply than they are run by the companies ? And there is the awkward fact that in Britain nationalisation of the railways would make the Government the direct employer of hundreds of thousands of workmen,—a consideration which alone would decide us against the proposal. Mr. Hobson frankly admits that in both railway and temperance legislation the Swiss voting has been largely determined by trade interests. Wine, beer, and cider combined to crush whisky. An apparent revolt against the growing evils of absinthe-drinking in the Vaud turns out to have been engineered by the jealous wine trade. The upshot of monopolising the spirit trade in Switzerland is simply that one private trade has been ruined —the distillers were bought out at a sum which does not pretend to have compensated them—and other private trades have been aided, but the total amount of drinking remains the same, or, rather, has slightly increased.