election of Senators.
It was quickly ratified by the states. The following year it was
proclaimed in effect.

=The Initiative and Referendum.=--As a corrective for the evils which
had grown up in state legislatures there arose a demand for the
introduction of a Swiss device known as the initiative and referendum.
The initiative permits any one to draw up a proposed bill; and, on
securing a certain number of signatures among the voters, to require the
submission of the measure to the people at an election. If the bill thus
initiated receives a sufficient majority, it becomes a law. The
referendum allows citizens who disapprove any act passed by the
legislature to get up a petition against it and thus bring about a
reference of the measure to the voters at the polls for approval or
rejection. These two practices constitute a form of "direct government."

These devices were prescribed "to restore the government to the people."
The Populists favored them in their platform of 1896. Mr. Bryan, two
years later, made them a part of his program, and in the same year South
Dakota adopted them. In 1902 Oregon, after a strenuous campaign, added a
direct legislation amendment to the state constitution. Within ten years
all the Southwestern, Mountain, and Pacific states, except Texas and
Wyoming, had followed this example. To the east of the Mississippi,
however, direct legislation met a chilly reception. By 1920 only five
states in this section had accepted it: Maine, Massachusetts, Ohio,
Michigan, and Maryland, the last approving the referendum only.

=The Recall.=--Executive officers and judges, as well as legislatures,
had come in for their share of criticism, and it was proposed that they
should likewise be subjected to a closer scrutiny by the public. For
this purpose there was advanced a scheme known as the recall--which
permitted a certain percentage of the voters to compel any officer, at
any time during his term, to go before the people at a new election.
This feature of direct government, tried out first in the city of Los
Angeles, was extended to state-wide uses in Oregon in 1908. It failed,
however, to capture popular imagination to the same degree as the
initiative and referendum. At the end of ten years' agitation, only ten
states, mainly in the West, had adopted it for general purposes, and
four of them did not apply it to the judges of the courts. Still it was
extensively acclaimed in cities and incorporated into h