country or of a community; such as the question where a capital city or a
county seat shall be located; the question whether a debt shall be incurred
that will be a lien on their property for a specific purpose; the question
whether the sale of intoxicating liquors shall he permitted. Upon certain
great simple questions which are susceptible of a _yes_ or _no_ answer it
is appropriate that the people should be called upon to express their
wish by a vote just as they express their choice of the persons who shall
exercise the powers of government by a vote. This, however, is very
different from undertaking to have the 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