of the Governor of the state must be learned. Every such place. shall have a person charged with its care and maintenance, who shall be legally responsible for the faithful performance of the laws within the said place of worship, and for all the objects used for purposes of worship. The caretaker himself, together with 10 other citizens, must advise the municipal authorities as to who is in charge of the said place of worship. The outgoing minister must give notice of any change, being accompanied in so doing by the incoming minister and 10 other citizens of the place. Municipal authorities, under penalty of $1000 and of dismissal, shall be responsible for the exact performance of this condition. They shall keep a register of the places of worship, and another of the caretakers, upon the same penalty. The municipal authorities shall give notice to the Department of the Interior, through the intermediary of the state Governor, of any permission to open to the public a new place of worship, as well as of any change in the caretakers.

Under no conditions shall the studies carried on in institutions devoted to training ministers of religious creeds receive the ratification of official institution. Any public officer violating this shall be punished criminally and the approval shall be null and void.

No periodical publication "which, either by reason of its program, its title, or merely by its general tendency, is of a religious character shall comment on any political affairs of the nation, nor publish any information regarding the acts of the authorities of the country, or of private individuals in so far as the latter have to do with public affairs."

"Every kind of political association whose name shall bear any word or any indication relating to any religious belief is hereby strictly forbidden. No assemblies of any political character shall be held within places of public worship."

"No minister of any religious creed may inherit, either on his own behalf or by means of a trustee or otherwise, any real property occupied by any association of religious propaganda or religious charitable purposes. Ministers of religious creeds are incapable legally of inheriting by will from ministers of the same religious sect or from any private individual to whom they are not related by blood within the fourth degree."

And finally:

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No trial by jury shall ever be granted for the infraction of any of the preceding provisions."

We have already seen that in Article 27 "Religious associations known as churches, irrespective of creed," are without capacity to acquire or hold real estate. All places of public worship are declared to be the property of the federal government. The property belonging to the churches, whether church buildings, rectories, episcopal residences, seminaries, orphan asylums or collegiate establishments, by the terms of Subdivision II of Article 27 are confiscated by the federal government. It is expressly declared that hereafter all places of public worship shall be the property of the nation, and, as if not satisfied with this, the churches and the ministers of any religious sects, and their dependents, are forbidden to patronize, direct, administer, have charge of or supervise public or private charitable institutions for the sick, for the needy, for scientific research, or for the diffusion of knowledge.

Mexico is a country with wholly inadequate provisions for its blind, its deaf and its insane. It is without adequate hospitals, without adequate libraries, without adequate institutions of learning, and its constitution makes no provision for a system of public education. It is hopelessly in debt. It is without the means under existing conditions to either meet its debt or raise adequate funds for the necessary expenses of an economically administered government commensurate with the tasks it has before it.

With that condition confronting it, it promulgates to the world a constitution under which all of the rights of man are guaranteed, and the power of suspending the guaranty is vested in a Chief Executive; a constitution in which the passage of labor laws is made mandatory, under which laws no man can afford to make the investment necessary for the development of its resources and to give employment to the laborers, the protection of whom is the avowed purpose of that constitution; but it places the suspension of those provisions for the protection of the laboring people of Mexico in the hands of the Chief Executive who in turn has passed it on to the executives of the several states. In so far as governmental edicts can do it, it closes Mexico to the work of all churches, to the civilizing influence of the Christian religion and its uplifting agencies.

I have no extraneous evidence to offer that that constitution was written by Emma Goldman or Alexander Berkmann, but I

fail to find anything in it which, when taken with all the other parts of the instrument, should prove unsatisfactory to either of those militant champions of a liberty unregulated by law.

But two more articles call for especial notice. Of "Transitory Articles," number 13 reads as follows:

"All debts contracted by working men on account of work up to the date of this constitution with masters, their subordinates and agents are hereby declared wholly and entirely extinguished." Transitory Article 14 reads as follows:

"The Departments of Justice and of Public Instruction and Fine Arts are hereby abolished."

The departments may have been abolished, but under the constitution confiscation as a fine art remains, and no public instruction is necessary to make repudiation an exact science.

Eighty-one years have gone by since the people of Texas separated themselves from the rest of Mexico, and, cherishing AngloSaxon ideals and adopting the common law and its institutions of freedom, set themselves to the task of building an imperial commonwealth in the form of a free republic, declaring through their second President, Mirabeau B. Lamar,

"Cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge, and the only security that freemen desire."

Seventy-two years have passed since that republic was merged into the American Union. Retaining the title to, and control of, its unappropriated public domain, by far the greater portion of which it dedicated and has applied to its institutions of public education, including its schools for the deaf and the blind, and its asylums for the deficient, it has worked out and is working out its purpose and its problem of guaranteeing the blessings of peace, of enlightenment, of material prosperity and personal security to the increasing millions that are its devoted citizens.

The remaining portion of Mexico has adhered to the traditions. of its past and the instincts and institutions of the people from which they came. The inadequate, however well meant and slowly progressing, efforts of the Diaz régime, for popular education ended with him. The orderly processes of the law have failed. Civilization's steps for nearly seven years have all been backward.

The description which Diedrick Knickerbocker wrote in humor may be applied in all seriousness to Mexico:

"The late beauteous prospect presents one scene of anarchy and wild uproar, as though old Chaos had resumed his reign and was hurling back into one vast turmoil the conflicting elements of nature."

Again, to quote from Senor Bulnes, the path which Mexico has trod during the past seven years has been

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a long and tortuous road, strewn with blood, crimes, infamies, heroic deeds, hallucinations, inconceivable depths of depravity, crushed ideals and suicidal tendencies born of desperation."

It may be that that is no concern of ours individually, nor as a people; that while the Mexican people choose to hold high carnival of lawlessness, wasting human life, destroying property, bringing up generations in idleness and worse, unmindful of the hundreds of millions of dollars our people have invested there, and the hundreds of millions the people of other countries have invested there, which, under our Monroe Doctrine, their governments are forbidden to protect, we have no duty but to stand While the tumult of the time disconsolate

To inarticulate murmur dies away,

While the eternal ages watch and wait."

If this be true, if no regeneration for that people is to come except from within, and under an organic law calculated to develop beyond all calculation a system of official blackmail, authorizing wholesale confiscations, proclaiming democracy but placing the lives and property of the people in the hands of an irresponsible executive, holding offce for four years and forever ineligible of re-election, then the best that can be hoped for that people is

"Thy hand, great Anarch, let the curtain fall,

And universal darkness bury all."

Let us hope that when this favored land shall emerge glorious and triumphant from the great struggle upon which we have so lately entered, when peace is again established throughout the world and its normal activities are resumed, we may be able to extend to our sorely tried neighbor on the south a helping hand and aid her to the establishment of a just and practicable governmental system, under which the rights of life, liberty and property shall be made secure and her systems of education and finance, her industries and her commerce shall be builded on a firm and enduring foundation.

PRUSSIAN LAW AS APPLIED IN BELGIUM.

BY

GASTON DE LEVAL.

Not in every country has the passion for human right and liberty been carried to the perfection of the American constitutional system, which gives the jurist power to protect the people against error and wrong. But in every country where civilization has won some standing it is recognized that the Bar has proved time and again the best refuge of liberty, the strongest fortress against tyranny. It is natural that it should be so. In our noble profession, the mind is trained from the first to consider right as against might and in practice when an innocent man or woman comes to us to fight a right cause, can we ever hesitate to take up the cause, though the opponent is powerful? Do we ever fear to use the sacred shield of the law against those, no matter who they are, who wish to crush the innocent? At the Bar the natural instinct for right of the human conscience, strengthened and confirmed by training, inspired by the traditions of the great masters of the past, forces us to take up the cause of right, notwithstanding what troubles may ensue, what menace may oppose. It is the duty and the custom of the Bar totally to disregard, even to disdain, the consequences of defending a righteous cause, and to fight out in the civil arena our battles after the manner of a soldier in the field, risking joyfully fortune, reputation, freedom and life for the triumph of right.

It is therefore natural that rulers who wish to base their rule on might alone and not on right have found the Bar against them. It was therefore natural that the Belgian Bar should stand as one man against the reign of terror which the Germans since 1914 have spread over my unfortunate country. The Belgian Bar has been, from the beginning of the martyrdom of Belgium to this day, a burning torch giving light to the conscience and warmth to the hearts of Belgians; and this torch has burned into