e ordinary powers of legislation
exercised at the ballot box.

In this field the weakness, both of the Initiative and of the Compulsory
Referendum, is that they are based upon a radical error as to what
constitutes the true difficulty of wise legislation. The difficulty is
not to determine what ought to be accomplished but to determine how to
accomplish it. The affairs with which statutes have to deal as a rule
involve the working of a great number and variety of motives incident to
human nature, and the working of those motives depends upon complicated
and often obscure facts of production, trade, social life, with which men
generally are not familiar and which require study and investigation to
understand. Thrusting a rigid prohibition or command into the operation of
these forces is apt to produce quite unexpected and unintended results.
Moreover, we already have a great body of laws, both statutory and
customary, and a great body of judicial decisions as to the meaning and
effect of existing laws. The result of adding a new law to this existing
body of laws is that we get, not the simple consequence which the words,
taken by themselves, would seem to require, but a resultant of forces from
the new law taken in connection with all existing laws. A very large part
of the litigation, injustice, dissatisfaction, and contempt for law which
we deplore, results from ignorant and inconsiderate legislation with
perfectly good intentions. The only safeguard against such evils and the
only method by which intelligent legislation can be reached is the method
of full discussion, comparison of views, modification and amendment of
proposed legislation in the light of discussion and the contribution and
conflict of many minds. This process can be had only through the procedure
of representative legislative bodies. Representative government is
something more than a device to enable the people to have their say when
they are too numerous to get together and say it. It is something more than
the employment of experts in legislation. Through legislative procedure
a different kind of treatment for legislative questions is secured by
concentration of responsibility, by discussion, and by opportunity to meet
objection with amendment. For this reason the attempt to legislate by
calling upon the people by popular vote to say yes or no to complicated
statutes must prove unsatisfactory and on the whole injurious. In ordinary
cases the voters w