cent labor and social movements that have caused
our increasing mass of constructive legislation in the last few years.
It is true that some of the far Western Territories adopted women's
suffrage soon after being made States, or at the time they were
admitted; but no other State, even of those surrounding them, has
followed their example, though the people have repeatedly voted on the
point. Whatever progress the cause may have made in England, or in the
larger cities of the East, I think that no unprejudiced observer would
say that it looks so 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
new