by the name of Peteet, with his wife and two daughters, crossed the border from San Diego, California, to Tia Juana in search of a "good time." Leaving his wife sick at a hotel, he went with his daughters from one resort to another, drinking here and there. Finally, at one of the saloons the daughters were drugged and outraged. When the father came to himself, he collected his small family and with them returned to San Diego. There all four, by mutual consent, committed suicide.

Mexico has thus been arousing the hostility of large groups of Americans. She has alarmed and antagonized those who have a strong sense of property rights, those who are loyal to their respective churches, and those who, whether moral themselves or not, do not want foreign immorality to flourish at their expense or the expense of their fellow-countrymen.

And the case against Mexico is strong. We do not have such complaints against our neighbor to the north. Canada does not try to confiscate the property of Americans within her borders, or to expel American priests, nuns, and ministers, or to permit dives and dens of vice along our border. It is natural that those who have property rights in Mexico should expect the American Government to protect those rights as Great Britain protects the rights of his Brittanic Majesty's subjects. It is natural that church people should protest against treatment that seems to them like sayagery. It is natural that the people of such a State as California should demand that something be done to clean up a plague spot in their neighborhood where open gambling, thieving, drinking, and dope dealing seem to be the only "industries," and where faro dens, gin mills, opium joints, and houses of ill fame are the only "monuments."

But let us look at the situation for a moment from the Mexican point of view.

For generations the people of Mexico have been exploited. Poor, they were deprived of their land. Accustomed to tyranny, they were subjected to new bondage. Ignorant, they were kept in ignorance by the Church. When the arbitrary rule of Diaz broke of its own. weight, they fell the prey of factions. Incapable of developing their resources for themselves, they have naturally allowed those resources to fall into the hands of foreigners, largely through cor

rupt practices. What would a patriotic Mexican wish to do for his people? First, to recover their land. Next, to drive out those who have exploited them. And yet Mexico is nominally a civilized nation with treaty obligations to other nations, and with a powerful neighbor who has good use for the oil and other wealthwhich is being developed and has good reason to wish to help her rise and become stable, and prosperous, and contented.

We should not forget that less than three hundred years ago England was expelling Catholic priests from her domain, and was violently struggling with the exploiters of her land and people. And as for Tia Juana-has it not been kept going, with all its abominations, by kept going, with all its abominations, by people from the United States? Is it so much a Mexican disgrace as an American disgrace?

Mexico is a problem because it is a sixteenth-century country in a twentiethcentury environment. What would have been normal a few centuries ago is anarchy to-day. The world has moved, and left Mexico behind. Perhaps there are some things of value which the world has passed by that Mexico still hasleisure and the love of music and the beautiful, for instance. But the twentieth century cannot very well adjust itself to the sixteenth; the sixteenth will have to adjust itself to the twentieth. And the process is going to be a slow one and calls for patience.

There has been a cry for intervention. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that we can honorably begin intervention without carrying it through. We tried that twice-once by bombarding Vera Cruz, and once by sending Pershing on a wild goose chase after Villaand both times it resulted only in humiliation for us. The only intervention that can count will be of a sort that involves a responsibility for Mexico which no American statesman has yet dared assume. Perhaps we ought to assume it. There was a time, during the period of anarchy there, when we could have successfully assumed it. But to intervene simply to settle some oil rights, or to make Mexico stop expelling priests and clergymen, or to clean up a frontier town, would be to start a policy that would lead us either to another humiliating failure or to a vast enterprise for which our people are at present wholly unprepared or possibly to start Mexico

Where in the United States at time is the effort making to substitut extra-legal for a legal method in gov ment?

The effort is making in the Senat the United States, where certain S tors, including a majority of the J ciary Committee, are trying to have Senate itself assume a function w legally and Constitutionally belong the Department of Justice. They been proposing to conduct an inves tion of the Aluminum Company America to determine whether or that company has engaged in trade p tices in restraint of trade, in violatio the anti-trust laws and of a consent cree entered against it fourteen years by a Federal court in Pennsylvania.

The Department of Justice alre has conducted an investigation of kind and has announced that there i ground for proceeding against the minum Company of America.

Now let it be assumed for the pur of this argument that the Alumi Company of America has in fact viol the consent decree, that it has eng and continues to engage in practices trary to the law.

Let it be assumed further that the vestigation made by the Departmen Justice, because of incompetence or s or corruption, was abortive.

Under that state of facts, Cong might proceed by legal means to s the ends of justice and of vindication the law. It would be the duty of House of Representatives to impeach Attorney-General and such other

s of the Department of Justice as ve been derelict in duty. It would be duty of the Senate to try those offils and, if they were found guilty, to move them, to the end that their places ght be taken by other officials who uld do their duty.

Let it be assumed, violent as the asmption is, that the President would appoint officials who would perform specific duty, but would appoint cials who, by reason of incompetence meglect, or deliberate intention, would ve the guilty corporation still unpund. Congress would have still its legal ans of procedure. It could by the e process impeach, convict, and reve from office the President of the ted States.

The majority of the Judiciary Comtee of the Senate, for whom Senator sh, of Montana, is the spokesman, e chosen not to employ these legal Ens, but to substitute for them extra

means the assumption by the ate, without legal authority, of the y in the discharge of which the Dement of Justice is said to have failed. uch a proceeding is revolutionary in it amounts to seizure by the Senate xecutive powers granted by the Contion to the President.

is revolutionary in that it seeks to e, or would have the effect of makthe legislative branch of the Govent supreme, whereas under the stitution it is co-ordinate in power the executive and the judicial ches. It would overturn the princihat sovereignty is lodged solely in Deople and, instead, would lodge sue power in one of the three branches vernment, the legislative.

the Senate can arrogate to itself superiority of power over one dement of the executive branch, it can me same for all departments of that ch-even for the third branch of nment, the judicial.

ere, certainly, is nothing less than ution.

- would be a bold man-or, peran excessively timid one who say that no change in our form of nment is desirable. It may well be the lodging of supreme authority where is desirable. It is not imole that one of the three branches vernment ought to be able to comthe other two.

t it is neither too bold nor too timid

to say that, if this change is to be brought about, it should be done by Constitutional, and not by revolutionary methods by an amendment to the Constitution rather than by an arbitrary assumption.

And if one branch is to be made supreme even by legal means, should that branch be the legislative?

It is well to remember that the hardest struggle in the history of Englishspeaking peoples has been that with irresponsible legislative authority. It was not by accident, but by design, that the Congress was limited by the Constitution to the powers therein granted.

Here are questions that the people ought to think about.

Perhaps the statement ought to be made that, though this is the boldest stroke so far, the revolution now seems less likely to succeed than it did two

T

years ago. When a revolution fails to go forward, it must almost inevitably go backward, and Senator Walsh apparently is not supported in his forward movement by his own party associates. Senator Robinson, of Arkansas, the Democratic leader in the Senate, is prepared to offer a substitute resolution directing the Senate to go no further than it went in the oil cases—that is, to recommend grand jury action. If, however, the will of the majority of the Judiciary Committee prevails despite this discouragement, the situation will become the more dangerous. It might have been hardly more than the bid of a party for political advantage, but that is in the main renounced by Senator Robinson's action. If the Senate now assumes the power which belongs to the Department of Justice, the action can be nothing short of usurpation.

HIS year of our Lord 1926 will see the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of one of the gentlest saints and most romantic figures of Christendom-St. Francis of Assisi. But it was neither the gentleness nor the romance of St. Francis that first drew me to him; it was his joyous sense of humor. This delightful quality of St. Francis, and of his early associates and followers, is a thing quite distinct from, although undoubtedly related to, the spiritual joy and serenity which saints of all ages have professed and felt. A sense of humor, says Emersion, speaking of Abraham Lincoln, enabled him "to keep his secret; to meet every kind of man and every rank in society; to take off the edge of the severest decisions; to mask his own purpose and sound his companion; and to catch with true instinct the temper of every company he addressed; and, more than all, it is to a man of severe labor, in anxious and exhausting crises, the natural restorative, good as sleep, and is the protection. of the over-driven brain against rancor and insanity."

St. Francis possessed this kind of a sense of humor. It appears definitely, once, at any rate, in the very creed which he wrote, and it peeps out frequently in the legends or stories, the Fioretti or

"Little Flowers," which were Woven about his name by his devoted followers and disciples. He had an appreciation of the droll and the comic. On one occasion, in an exhortation to his disciples, he went so far as to point his moral with an excellent pun. Paul Sabatier, a French Protestant and a most painstaking and loyal biographer of St. Francis, says that "in the history of the early Franciscan Mission there are bursts of laughter which ring out high and clear."

It was Paul Sabatier's biography which, about thirty years ago, first attracted my attention to St. Francis and to the quality of his humor. From that biography I learned that one of the precepts of the Rule of the Franciscan Order, a Rule which is believed to come from the hand of the saint himself, inculcates a sense of humor. It reads, in the colloquial Latin which St. Francis wrote and spoke, as follows:

Caveant fratres quod non ostendant se tristes extrinsicus, nubilosos. et hypocritas; sed ostendant se gaudentes in Domine, hilares et convenienter gratiosos.

This may be fairly put into English in these words:

Let the brothers take care not to appear long-faced, gloomy, or overpious; but let them be joyous about

their faith in God, laughing and agreeable companions.

I once translated convenienter gratiosos by the term "good mixers." But I found this colloquialism grated slightly on the ears of a good friend of mine, a devout Catholic, who felt that it was a little inappropriate to apply so modern a phrase to so sanctified a spirit as St. Francis. But why not? The great Master of St. Francis was accused by the conventionalists of his day of being a mixer with publicans and sinners; and a conservative and entirely respectable British journal, the "Quarterly Review," recently said that the gratiosus side of Jesus has been too much neglected. In reviewing Bruce Barton's "The Man Nobody Knows," which may almost be called a colloquial life of Jesus, the "Quarterly" remarks that the book "brings out admirably that side of the personality of Christ which superstition has denied to him-his joy of life, his laughter, qualities which he must have possessed if he were to win (as he did win) the hearts of children and of the every-day multitude."

He

This power of attraction St. Francis also possessed and quite naturally. His father was a rich merchant and his mother a lady of the gentry. Intended to be a wealthy business man and supplied by his father with plenty of money and leisure, he was a gay, lively, and popular young man about town. even went to the wars in search of mundane glory. But after a sudden conversion, which some would like to think not less miraculous than St. Paul's, he abandoned wealth and war and became the apostle of poverty and peace. But he never was, like some of the saints on the calendar, an eremite; to the end of his comparatively short, but superlatively influential, career he maintained his love of life and joy and the beauties of nature. Nor, apparently, did he entirely lose the power of employing the language of the trenches and the camps, for an ardent disciple and companion, Thomas of Celano, tells us that on one occasion he vented his indignation on a friar, who showed a too great fondness for the society of ladies, in words scarcely suitable to be literally repeated in the biography of a saint. His instinctive gayety sometimes cropped out in an unexpected way. The same contemporary biographer who describes his vigorous denunciation of the amorous

Reproduction of the painting by Spagnoletto in the Palazzo Reale, Genoa

friar says that more than once he saw St. Francis take a stick and, drawing it across his arm like a fiddle bow on a fiddle, sing psalms of praises to the Lord in French; and French was pre-eminently the joyous language of his time. Perhaps these hymns were his own composition. There is one still in existence, which is at least ascribed to him, the famous "Hymn to the Sun." It was perhaps suggested to him by the 148th Psalm. In it he calls upon all creatures to praise the Lord, especially Brother Sun, radiant and splendid; and Sister Moon, luminous and lovely in the sky; and Brother Wind, the master of cloud and fair weather; and Sister Water, precious and pure; and Brother Fire, luminous, mighty, and strong; and Mother Earth, which gives us fruits and flowers of many colors. The man who wrote this surely loved life and its beauties.

He loved, too, in a way, if the Fioretti may be believed, the very foolishness of men. One of his favorites was a Friar Juniper, who was all the time doing the most senseless things by way of expressing his faith and devotion, and all the time exciting equally the vexation, the amusement, and the compassion of St.

Francis. One day Friar Juniper c the foot of a pig, pasturing in the f to cook and give to a fellow-frian was sick. Naturally, the owner c pig came to the brethren in a sta fury. But when Friar Juniper expl to the man that he had done it ou spirit of charity and of service to and by his spirit of simplicity so wr upon the owner of the pig that h then and there converted and gave was left of the pig to the friars for sustenance and announced that he hereafter devote himself to a li piety, St. Francis's indignation an noyance with Friar Juniper was ch to compassion and he exclaimed companions, "Would to God, my ren, that I had a whole forest of junipers!"

One of the pleasantest stories Francis is that of his sermon to the On one of his preaching mission stopped by the wayside and said companions, "Tarry here for me b way, and I will go and preach t little sisters, the birds." Whereup bade the birds to be grateful to Creator for the feathers with which were clothed, for the wings with

D

EAR SONJA!

For some time already I had the intention to answer your kind letter from home, but could not do it before, having been so very busy.

Knowing your great interest in everything that concerns art and considering your prominent talent for dancing, I may presume that you will be interested to hear something about the theaters in Moscow. I will then start with a short description of what I have seen myself.

In the first place, the Theater of the Revolution. It is extraordinarily cheap

a good seat in the fourth or fifth row from the stage costs 50 copeks; but the place is unventilated and exceedingly dirty. The audience is frightful. The common tovarisch (comrade) in top boots, golif (riding breeches), and leather jacket is predominant. The greater the surprise, owing to the talented acting of the artists, which one could not possibly have expected in such surroundings. They act so entrancingly that one forgets audience, bad air, and all the dirt, and gives one's seli entirely up to the play.

The decorations are the strangest of all in this theater: no side scenes, but only wooden scaffoldings, or, as they are called here, frames. Everywhere there are poles, ladders, small steps, just like those being used in the erection of a new building. The actors are obliged to climb about on these "scaffoldings," a proceeding that in the excitement of acting might occasionally surely be far from easy to them. I personally cannot see any reason for these frames on the stage. I have heard that this arrangement is said to have come from western Europe, and therefore I hope very soon to get an explanation about this point from you, as you have lately visited several larger towns in western Europe.

The play that I saw was a short story of the Revolution, full of political jokes and very drastic humor. Kerenski, among others, was represented. One could fully admire his inexhaustible capacity for talking, as well as the dexterity with which he could kiss in a moment a whole crowd of young girls without stopping in his speech. The play ended, as the custom here is, with a great apotheosis, with many sailors on the stage and glorification of Bolshevism.

The theater of the Revolution had already made upon me, a novice, a certain impression. But what was that in comparison to Meyerhold's Theater in the magnificent building of the former

"Son," on the Place of Triumph! The grand entrance to the chief hall is full of people. On both sides of the broad stairs are rooms where people indulge in high-play roulette and hazard; the entrance fee to each gambling hell is one ruble. The company is rather mixed, elegant dresses from Paris intermingling with shabby blouses and jackets. One sees ladies whose dresses are cut out far over the limit, whereas the more elegant men chiefly sport a dark lounge suit, the coat looking a little overgrown, the trousers wide and exceedingly short. Many foreigners are present; one hears English, German, French. The seats are very expensive, but the theater is sold out every evening.

I have seen "What Price Europe?" and do not regret having been there. I only wish that you were present also. Because the actors piayed brilliantly, pointedly amusing and ghastly from beginning to end. The story is, in short, as follows: A trust of American milliardaires decides to destroy the old "rotten" Europe and to colonize it then. anew. Germany goes to rack and ruin in dancing. The play takes place in the Café Risch, Unter den Linden, at Berlin; everything true to nature, including the big Negro doorkeeper, Jimmy. Ladies and gentlemen are dancing zealously round the tables. Suddenly there appear American airplanes and throw bombs on the dancers. Consequently, a ghastly effect: moaning, yelling, dying pairs are wallowing in their blood. This is the end of Germany.

England is being starved out, the Americans cutting it off from all and every connection with the outside world. On the stage an elegant gentlemen's party in evening dress by dim violetcolored lights. But they eat the fingers of one of their friends, whom they had slaughtered previously, and now they are all almost beside themselves from hunger. One of them plays a holy hymn on the harmonium and accompanies the play with low whining. In spite of the hunger and the approaching madness, the gentlemen behave faultlessly; they talk with subdued voices about shooting and other indifferent things, until suddenly one of them, going out of his mind, breaks out into terrible laughter. The others there and then lose their artificial attitude. They throw themselves upon the maniac, and there begins a wild chase over and under tables, chairs, and cupboards, till at last the unfortunate one is seized and done with. Perhaps a Hanns

Heinz Evers would be able to prop
characterize such a scene! I am
sure that even you, who are so
and do not get excited about anyt
would not be spared a little shu
looking on at these things. At any
a cock-fight or serpent dance by H
Evers are trifles in comparison with
play.

Therewith England is destroyed there remains only France, which is as is well known, to be very suscep to all kinds of vices. The clever A cans very successfully make use of French quality. They overwhelm unfortunate ones with such a quantit the most crafty vices that they lose power of resistance and quickly surely go to the devil. Some scenes also shown here on the stage which very strongly upon the nerves, but not think that your pure mind w suffer me to go into particulars. W all this is being done in western Eu the tovarischi have not been idle. V immense energy they have dug tur to Germany, France, and England, have saved through those tunnels their own people that is, the whol the proletarians of these countries. ing, of course, with the victory of Bolshevism over the Americans in ticular, over the world in general, great noise, many lighting effects, with sailors on the stage.

On the stage of Meyerhold's ther no side scenes either, only wooden titions or screens, which are being r there and back during the chang scenes; this still increases the noise the intended confusion on the stage. general din is being heightened owi the orchestra playing almost incess jimmies and five-steps, on quite normal instruments. The musi make faces to the audience, roar sionally loudly, and knock each with the fiddles and drums on the h This conduct of the orchestra irri me in the beginning to some exten: had heard up till now only well-beh bands, who did not allow thems such unmusical jokes.

In the third theater which I visite audience were sitting on carpets a floor. Gentlemen and ladies were c ing as near as possible together, or i nearest vicinity of the provisions br along. If any one of the artists act their liking, sandwiches, apples, or Į of chocolate were thrown to him, the lucky receiver ate up on the there and then. Actors who were