Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 Excerpt:...of ideas and the establishment of systems. So it was with the progressive, liberal ideas of the Florentine martyr, that glowing genius of the fifteenth century, Jerome Savonarola. Beneficent, humane and just as was the government he sought to institute upon the ruins of the cruel splendors of the Medici, his cloistered training had left him, with all his wisdom and all his courage, impractical and unfitted to maintain his position, impregnable as it was in righteousness, against the organized opposition of vested wrong. And yet it was but little more than a century and a half later that the stern and practical Cromwell established substantially the same system in England, and maintained it long enough to demonstrate to a wondering world that governments could exist and prosper without a king--long enough to plant deep those seeds of liberty, which found root and developed the sturdy plant which has bloomed and fruited in the American Republic, and the constitutional governments of the Old World. Thus that was It with that literary marvel of France. Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose vivid conceptions of individual sov as ancient as the Declaration of Independence, and is nothing more than the right of petition always sacred to men of English blood, strengthened by its mandatory character only. The important requisite of the initiative would necessarily be that the legal percentage of voters petitioning should be sufficiently large to be a guaranty that the legislation asked for has behind it the sound judgment of the people--something more than that peculiar and perpetual desire to disturb existing conditions, which seems always to infect a small portion of every community, consisting of a class of well meaning but ill-balanced men. to whom every change is reform...