the Powers, the neutralization of the islands, and thus relieve ourselves from any possible expense and loss of life, and at the same time reserve certain coaling stations to ourselves for naval and trade purposes.

Imperialism is the American crime, for the reason that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and to impose upon the people of an alien and inferior race a government of force without their consent is tyranny. It is criminal for the reason that this country cannot long endure half republic and half empire, and for the reason that despotism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home. It is criminal because it has involved this nation in unnecessary war, entailing the sacrifice of thousands of lives, Americans and Filipinos, and because it has placed our country, previously known to the nations of the world as the champion of freedom, in the odious and un-American position of having crushed with military force and treachery* the efforts of a people to achieve liberty and self-government.

could be reduced about one-half if we made the Filipinos independent. This assertion is plainly borne out by the fact that our regular army was onethird of its present size at the time we began the conquest of the Philippines.

The Filipinos cannot become American citizens without endangering our civilization. They cannot become subjects without imperiling our form of government; and we should be most unwilling to surrender our civilization or to convert this pioneer republic of ours into an Empire for the sake of the subjugation of an alien and inferior race over 10,000 miles distant from our nearest coast. Therefore it is time that the United States Government, our government, washes its hands of this bloody iniquity, as Carl Shurtz said, and makes manifest its moral soundness to all the world by immediately granting the Filipinos a more stable form of government and then within the next two or three years giving them their independence, at the same time securing them from outside interference, as we did way back in President Monroe's time to the republics of South and Central America.

As a fitting close to an article against the Imperialistic policy adhered to by our three last national administrations, let me quote the following from the silvery tongue of that distinguished champion of self-government, William J. Bryan:

Our present very large regular army

Note The Filipino leader, Aguanaldo, was captured by Americans by means of treachery of the blackest sort. As far as the author could learn, he is still detained as a prisoner.

"In commemoration of the fact that France was our ally in securing independence, the citizens of that nation joined with the citizens of the United States in

statue representing Liberty enlightening the world. What course shall our nation pursue? Send the statue of liberty back to France and borrow from England a statue of William the Conqueror. Or shall our nation so act as to enable the American people to join with the Filipinos in placing in the harbor of Manila a statue of Liberty enlightening the Orient?"

TH

HE last Constitutional Convention, in dealing with the question of suffrage, confronted a difficult situation. It endeavored to confer the right of suffrage on all white men and to deny it to all except the most intelligent of the negroes. In their way stood the fifteenth amendment, and the consequent danger of interference by the Federal Courts. After much discussion, the convention provided for two registrations. The first registration was to be made in 1902-3, and those eligible for that registration were:

(1) Veterans and sons of veterans. (2) Persons paying state taxes of at least a dollar a year.

1,350 in the counties, and 110 in the cities.

Section 25 of the Constitution requires the General Assembly to provide an appeal for any one denied registration, but is silent as to an appeal on the refusal of a registrar to strike off the list a person alleged to be illegally registered.

The General Assembly of

1902-3-4 obeyed this mandate by enacting section 83-A of the Code, but at the same time it repealed the old law, which gave the right of appeal upon the refusal of a registrar to strike a name from the list.

This registration became a permanent record and persons then enrolled are not required to register again.

The second registration law took effect in 1904, and is the permanent registration law of the state, as provided in section 20 of the Constitution. Under this registration the requirements, after providing for the payment of a poll tax, are:

"Second. That unless physically unable, he make application to register in his own hand-writing, without aid, suggestion, or memorandum, in the presence of the registration officers, stating therein his name, age, date and place of birth, residence and occupation at the time and for the two years next preceding, and whether he has previously voted, and if so, the state, county and precinct in which he voted last; and,

"Third. That he answer on oath any and all questions affecting his qualifications as an elector, submitted to him by the officers of registration, which questions, and his answers thereto, shall be reduced to writing, certified by the said officers, and preserved as a part of their official records."

The actual registration is done by the various registrars of whom there are

provides that any five qualified voters of any election district may, fifteen days previous to either of the regular days for registration, post the names of persons claimed to be illegally registered. Whereupon, on the regular day of registration the registrar shall hear evidence for and against the right of the persons posted to register. If the registrar decides that a person should be stricken off, such person has an appeal to the courts.

If, on the other hand, the registrar refuses to strike off, there is no appeal and the act of the registrar cannot be questioned.

There are two regular registration days in the year-the third Tuesday in May and the day that is thirty days before the November election.

The difficulties in the way of purging the books of illegal voters are these:

(1) The 1,460 registrars cannot be controlled in the matter of refusing to strike off a name and there is no way of compelling them, no matter how flagrant the defiance of law.

(2) There is no way at all of getting rid of the names improperly put on the registration books after fifteen days before the regular registration day in May, until the next regular registration day before the November election. Should any election occur between those dates there is no legal method of purging the list. There is no way of getting rid of the names put improperly on the books from fifteen days before the registration day before the November election, until the next regular registration day in the following May.

(3) An obstinate registrar can and has made it very difficult to see his books at all.

All these difficulties apply with great force to any attempt to purge the lists for any general election, but the breakdown of the law is much more flagrant in the case of a local option election, which cannot be held within thirty days of a regular election.

Suppose, for instance, a local option election is held in the early part of May, nobody put on the registration books since fifteen days before the last November regular registration day

could be stricken off.

If the local option election was held in July or August, no names could be removed which were placed there fifteen days before the regular registration day in May. It follows that the electorate at any local option election may be debauched at the will of any unscrupulous registrar.

That the law has been violated in numerous instances, sometimes carelessly, sometimes designedly, cannot be doubted.

There is very grave danger that unless the General Assembly enacts remedial legislation, by virtue of which the voting lists can be purified and kept pure, the electorate will degenerate into a plight worse than before the new Constitution. Prior to the present Constitution, any elector could challenge the right of any person to registration, and

if the registrar decided against his challenge, he had the right of appeal.

Under the stress of local option elections, the number of negroes registered increased in Staunton from four to 72; in Berryville, from four to 52, in Harrisonburg, from 24 to 85; in Fredericksburg, from about 30 to 95; in Roanoke, from about 75 to 200.

Should, in the case of a state-wide referendum, a proportionate number of negroes be registered, the negro vote would hold the balance of power not only in such referendum, but in general elections. We must regard such a result as a calamity. Not only have negroes been placed in large numbers upon the registration books, but many white men have been illegally registered. It appears, as the result of a judicial investigation, that in Lynchburg 366 persons were illegally registered in one year.

Now that the attention of the people has been called to this menace, it will be the sacred duty of the next General Assembly to safeguard, by effective remedial legislation, the registration lists. The suffrage clauses of the new Constitution have been enacted in vain if the opportunity for fraud is only changed from the ballot box to the reg

istration books.

I earnestly hope that the next General Assembly will enact statutes providing:

(1) Greater publicity for the registration lists and better facilities for examining them.

(2) An appeal from the decision of the registrar refusing to strike off a challenged name.

(3) Fix a time before every general and every referendum election at which challenges may be made and heard against illegal registrations and forbid further registrations between such time and the election.

(4) Punish registrars criminally for a wilful illegal registration and provide for their removal by the courts for carelessness or inefficiency.

A state-wide referendum without these necessary reforms in the law, would be a public calamity because, judging the future by the past, thousands of negroes would obtain franchise, the Constitution as to its franchise provisions would be set aside and a large, ignorant and venal vote would become a source of festering corruption in the body politics.

If statutes accomplishing the reforms which I have pointed out are not enacted by the General Assembly of 1912, then if any state-wide referendum bill is made a law, the bill itself should embody such provisions as are necessary to make it certain that the questions submitted to the people by the referendum shall be decided by a legal electorate.

TH

March 8, 1910.

HIS morning Louise telephoned that I should enjoy the account of a hardy garden in one of the March magazines.

Louise has a loftier mind and a prettier garden than I, for I didn't enjoy it. I writhed in a green jealousy over the vision of enough "gardeners to lift 10,000 asters", where I had to depend upon my two hands and a ten-cent trowel for transplanting. Casually to speak of "fertilizer" (sweetest word in the English tongue) by the "car load"! I felt gloomy over the inequality of things, and presently I went into the garden, pulled up a weed or two, disconsolately, and then noticed that the wire-grass was getting around my roses. I was down on my knees forthwith, diging away at the snaky roots of the invader. Two hours slipped by before I realized it, and when I went back into the house, I took up the magazine again. "I must try delphiniums like these another year," I determined, as I went to the telephone to call up Miss Mattie. "I have a garden article I want you to read. You'll enjoy it."

A gleam of self-recognition came to me, and I laughed at my own expense and bade my sullen soul remember:

"If we cannot choose the lives we would It surely yet is good,

To look where those lives be."

I am going to make this a Garden Mercy Book. Haven't you known people who have a "Mercy Box," in which they drop a penny every time they think of some little every-day blessing? Perhaps if I jot down the passing pleasures of my nondescript, raggedy garden, I shan't again feel so bitter about the fertilizer.

March 18.

A delightful girl is here for a day or two and I asked her to have a cup of tea with me this afternoon. When I went into the garden to cut the daffodils, they looked so golden and joyous that I could not chop off their heads to put them into vases. "Mary will have to come to them," I decided, though a March garden party in which we should have to keep on wraps and furs might be a degree unusual. The half a dozen congenial spirits chorused delightedly when they were led into the back yard instead of the living room. My goose plum tree, an exceptionally large one, was a mass of white blossoms. The myriad snowy flowers, the black branches against the bluest of spring skies, made so Japanese an effect that

one missed Fuji-Yama. The early peach tree was in bloom: it has poor fruit but such exquisite blossoms that is is spared for the fortnight of spring time it gives. We had a beautiful time under the trees, with appetites sharpened for sandwiches and tea-cakes, and English cosy keeping the tea hot for our second cups. Gleefully we named over the mutual friends who would have loathed to be in our places. One dear little lady in particular we could fancy with her feet tucked up apprehensively under her skirts for fear of the damp ground, certain that she would "catch her death of cold," and

wondering how soon it would be polite to say goodbye and hurry home to take a quinine pill.

March 20.

I have been wondering whether a person would ever feel at home in another person's garden? It seems to me that he who plants the garden has the best of it, for he glimpses the holy mystery of creation. One would not exchange the plot one has loved and tended for another, no matter how finished and alluring it might be. Your neighbor's daughter may be a goldenhaired goddess, but you don't want to change the brown poll of your own small son.

Perhaps the beginning of my garden mercies is that it would be hard to imagine a drearier spot than the yard when I first bought my home six years ago. It should have been exhibited by Woman's Clubs as a frightful example of everything a yard should not be a dismal otaheite mulberry in the centre, a layer of coal ashes more than a foot deep on which the water stood for days after a rain, a path of planks leading to the garden proper, around which staggered a dilapidated fence. This garden had been used as a depository for rubbish and tin cans; there was neither bed nor path, and the only relic of any former tenant who had cared. for it was the fine old plum tree and a

few peach trees. few peach trees. Before it could be plowed and harrowed, five wagon loads of weeds and trash had to be hauled away. So whatever gift or grace the place has now is my small contribution to William Morris' creed.

""Tis we ourselves, each one of us, who must keep watch and ward over the fairness of the earth, and each with his own soul and hand do his due share therein, lest we deliver to our sons a lesser treasure than our fathers left to us."

March 23.

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,"... only mine are at the far end of the garden, yet making the whole spot fragrant. The garden has gone into light mourning: the purple and white lilacs, the bed of purple pansies (the yellow ones are in Chinese mourning) and a single purple magnolia. It grew from a slip from the big one in my great-grandmother's garden, where all my childish playdays were spent. Perhaps it is rather a stiff and graceless flower, but it is redolent. with memories to me.

March 30.

Isn't it queer what things people find to bother about? I was talking to an especial friend today, and she was complaining about certain people who had not called. She didn't care a fig for them, but she was annoyed at their remissness-while I think of the formal call as something to be endured with due patience, because we are in a state of probation.

"Pining for the casual caller or wondering if she had slighted me intentionally would be the very last thought to occur to me."

"I hope your happy disposition affords you some pleasure; it is certainly very irritating to other people," stated my friend, resentfully. "You never bother about anything.'

"I certainly do," I retorted, indignantly disproving it. "Why, right now