You will of course understand that, both in the case of the initiative and referendum and in that of the recall, the very existence of these powers, the very possibilities which they imply, are half—indeed, much more than half—the battle. They rarely need to be actually exercised. The fact that the people may initiate keeps the members of the legislature awake to the necessity of initiating themselves; the fact that the people have the right to demand the submission of a legislative measure to popular vote renders the members of the legislature wary of bills that would not pass the people; the very possibility of being recalled puts the official on his best behavior.
It is another matter when we come to the judiciary. I myself have never been in favor of the recall of judges. Not because some judges have not deserved to be recalled. That isn’t the point. The point is that the recall of judges is treating the symptom instead of the disease. The disease lies deeper, and sometimes it is very virulent and very dangerous. There have been courts in the United States which were controlled by private interests. There have been supreme courts in our states before which plain men could not get justice. There have been corrupt judges; there have been controlled judges; there have been judges who acted as other men’s servants and not as the servants of the public. Ah, there are some shameful chapters in the story! The judicial process is the ultimate safeguard of the things that we must hold stable in this country. But suppose that that safeguard is corrupted; suppose that it does not guard my interests and yours, but guards merely the interests of a very small group of individuals; and, whenever your interest clashes with theirs, yours will have to give way, though you represent ninety percent of the citizens, and they only ten percent. Then where is your safeguard?
The just thought of the people must control the judiciary, as it controls every other instrument of government. But there are ways and ways of controlling it. If—mark you, I say if—at one time the Southern Pacific Railroad owned the supreme court of the State of California, would you remedy that situation by recalling the judges of the court? What good would that do, so long as the Southern Pacific Railroad could substitute others for them? You would not be cutting deep enough. Where you want to go is to the process by which those judges were selected. And when you get there, you will reach the moral of the whole of this discussion, because the moral of it all is that the people of the United States have suspected, until their suspicions have been justified by all sorts of substantial and unanswerable evidence, that, in place after place, at turning-points in the history of this country, we have been controlled by private understandings and not by the public interest; and that influences which were improper, if not corrupt, have determined everything from the making of laws to the administration of justice. The disease lies in the region where these men get their nominations; and if you can recover for the people the selecting of judges, you will not have to trouble about their recall. Selection is of more radical consequence than election.
I am aware that those who advocate these measures which we have been discussing are denounced as dangerous radicals. I am particularly interested to observe that the men who cry out most loudly against what they call radicalism are the men who find that their private game in politics is being spoiled. Who are the arch-conservatives nowadays? Who are the men who utter the most fervid praise of the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the states? They are the gentlemen who used to get behind those documents to play hide-and-seek with the people whom they pretended to serve. They are the men who entrenched themselves in the laws which they misinterpreted and misused. If now they are afraid that “radicalism” will sweep them away—and I believe it will—they have only themselves to thank.
Yet how absurd is the charge that we who are demanding that our government be made representative of the people and responsive to their demands—how fictitious and hypocritical is the charge that we are attacking the fundamental principles of republican institutions! These very men who hysterically profess their alarm would declaim loudly enough on the Fourth of July of the Declaration of Independence; they would go on and talk of those splendid utterances in our earliest state constitutions, which have been copied in all our later ones, taken from the Petition of Rights, or the Declaration of Rights, those great fundamental documents of the struggle for liberty in England; and yet in these very documents we read such uncompromising statements as this: that, when at any time the people of a commonwealth find that their government is not suitable to the circumstances of their lives or the promotion of their liberties, it is their privilege to alter it at their pleasure, and alter it in any degree. That is the foundation, that is the very central doctrine, that is the ground principle, of American institutions.
I want you to read a passage from the Virginia Bill of Rights, that immortal document which has been a model for declarations of liberty throughout the rest of the continent:
That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.
That government is, or ought to be, instituted
