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 Neuchatel, 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 might soon be even more rare than in this country half a century ago, since methods of production at that time were comparatively primitive and the free land only in the West. If Switzerland, small in area, naturally a poor country, and with a dense population, has gone far toward banishing pauperism and plutocracy, what wealth for all might not be reckoned in America, so fertile, so broad, so sparsely populated!