natural. The success of their executive councils may in this country
assist in raising up the power of the people as against one man power.
The fact that the cantons have no senates and that a second chamber is
an obstacle to direct legislation may here hasten the abolition of these
nurseries of aristocracy.

With the advance of progress under direct legislation, attention would
doubtless be attracted in the United States, as it has been in
Switzerland, to the nicer shades of justice to minorities and to the
broader fields of internal improvement. As in the cantons of Ticino and
Neuchâtel, our legislative bodies might be opened to minority
representatives. As in the Swiss Confederation, the great forests might
be declared forever the inheritance of the nation. What public lands yet
remain in each state might be withheld from private ownership except on
occupancy and use, and the area might be so increased as to enable
every producer desiring it to exercise the natural right of free access
to the soil. Then the right to labor, now being demanded through the
Initiative by the Swiss workingmen's party, might here be made an
admitted fact. And as is now also being done in Switzerland, the public
control might be extended to water powers and similar resources of
nature.

Thus in state and nation might practicable radical reforms make their
way. From the beginning, as has been seen, benefits would be widespread.
It might not be long before the most crying social evils were at an end.
Progressive taxation and abolition of monopoly privileges would cause
the great private fortunes of the country to melt away, to add to the
producers' earnings. On a part of the soil being made free of access,
the land-hungry would withdraw from the cities, relieving the
overstocked labor markets. Poverty of the able-bodied willing to work