another correctional school for boys, an industrial institute for men, and one for women.

Of hospitals under federal aid we have several, the oldest dating back to the time of the conqueror, Herman Cortez, long before hospitals could have been established in the United States. present a general hospital is being finished. This splendid institution will have 900 beds, will comprise wards for men, women, and children, and a separate one for infectious diseases, and will contain all the latest improvements and appliances.

The National Loan Office is another institution to which passing reference may be made, as its aims are noble and its work highly creditable. It enables the poor to obtain loans on pledges at almost nominal rates of interest. An idea of its importance may be obtained when it is known that in 1899 it loaned over $3,000,000 in 500,000 transactions.

As to insane asylums, we have two at the capital; but, the buildings which they occupy being no longer suited to modern methods, a larger and thoroughly equipped institution of the kind is to be erected.

In the states of the Mexican Republic the observer will also find many charitable institutions. Hospitals, asylums, and correctional schools in great numbers are established in all the leading cities of the nation, and even in small municipalities. Some, like the lyingin and general hospitals of Puebla and the famous Hospicio of Guadalajara, give ample testimony as to the charitable impulses of the Mexican people.

Among private benefactions I cannot forego mentioning the Workingwomen's Home, established at the City of Mexico by Mrs. Diaz, the president's deservedly popular wife, who is beloved by all, and the charities now being put into successful operation under the will of the late Matias Romero, for many years Mexico's able and patriotic diplomatic representative in this country. Of the foreign colonies in our capital the American, Spanish, French, and Swiss residents have the best-equipped hospitals.

And here let me say that private benefaction is now well regulated and encouraged by a new law approved Dec. 19, 1899, establishing a board of charities, and which, I think, will meet some of the requirements and conditions discussed at these meetings regarding private charities.

The cursory remarks I have made regarding the charitable and correctional institutions in the Mexican Republic will convince you, I hope, that your work will find sympathetic appreciation in my country. We, as a nation, believe that home influence and home surroundings are the greatest and most potent factors in bringing about the happiness of our people. But we likewise know that public, charitable, and correctional institutions, without any distinction as to race, nationality, or religion, are necessary for the wellbeing of humanity.

With the cordial greetings of President Diaz and of my government, which gave me the pleasing mission which I am now performing, I wish you all success in your beneficent labors. These labors will undoubtedly be far-reaching in their effects, since they will serve to alleviate suffering and to ameliorate the condition of the poor. Their proper recognition in my country will contribute in a way to weld more firmly together through that noble and holy virtue — charity the ties of friendship which happily bind our two sister republics.

IV.

Legislation concerning Charities.

SPECIAL FIELD OF NATIONAL LEGISLATION.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON LEGISLATION, BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM W. FOLWELL, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA.

The committee, whose report is now submitted, appears for the first time on the programme of the Conference.

A consultation of its members soon after appointment revealed a doubt on the part of some whether the Conference had not acted unadvisedly in forming a committee on legislation. It was suggested that the office of the Conference is to arouse and lead public sentiment, to create a soil and an atmosphere in which legislative projects may generate and develop spontaneously. The Conference, by engaging in the framing of particular bills, and steering them to passage through legislative bodies, would abandon its wide sphere of influences to drop into narrow grooves of routine. Such associa tions may be all-powerful as organizations of influence, but weak and ridiculous when they undertake to compass their ends by the employment of power.

Your committee, however, do not believe themselves obliged to presume that in their appointment the Conference proposed to depart from its traditional policy.

It is much more reasonable to assume that the first intention was that inquiry should be made into the nature and range of past and existing legislation for the information of the Conference and the public. A report from year to year upon the laws proposed and enacted in the several states might serve a very useful purpose; and comparative studies, covering long periods, would be of high value. Successful experiments might become models for new measures, and failures in one quarter need not be repeated elsewhere.

If the investigations contemplated should at times fairly warrant a suggestion of an improvement, an extension, or a co-ordination of laws and administration, it could be easily tolerated. It may as well be frankly stated that your present committee will have occasion to avail themselves of such indulgence.

The ever-admirable preamble to the national constitution sums up the objects of its establishment. After naming the irreducible elements of government,-" justice," "domestic tranquillity," and "the common defence,"—it proposes "the general welfare." This phrase, ambiguous in terms, has been held to import the general wellbeing of the states as politically united, not of the people socially and distributively. Congress is not authorized to assume in the states those general police powers which secure the health and safety of the people and promote their culture. The protection of person and property, the family relations, the education of the young, highways, the public health, and the care of unfortunates are under the guardianship of and a charge upon the states. May the rights of the states to exercise all such powers and fulfil the obligations accordant therewith forever remain undiminished!

For a hundred years and more the several states have been engaged in legislation in regard to unfortunates. There is an enormous mass of statutes and ordinances relating to the punishment of crimes and misdemeanors, the care of the poor and infirm, the cure or custody of the insane, the idiotic, the inebriate, and the epileptic, and the education of defectives, to say nothing of accompanying "judge-made law." Under these laws innumerable experiments in administration have been made. Thousands of penal and charitable institutions dot the map, and an army of people do faithful service therein. These exist and serve in state groups, and present all varieties of organization and efficiency. There is a wilderness of systems, experiments, precedents, records, statistics,- all waiting, for what? You have anticipated the obvious answer. For collection, discussion, arrangement, and diffusion. "Wanted, then," we may advertise," a clearing-house of charities and corrections for these United States, so long disunited in regard to these great interests."

Assembled under the shadow of the national capitol, may it not be both timely and appropriate for the Conference to inquire whether there is not a special field within which the national government may beneficently act without trespassing upon the domain of state activity?

The foundation for the answer to such a question has already been laid by the establishment of a policy consistent with the principle just announced of national co-ordination of state activity. A few examples will sustain this proposition.

Our great fundamental industry, agriculture, had been so developed, chiefly through the applications of science, by the middle of the last century that demands came from many quarters for a central agency, which should collect and distribute a huge mass of facts and truths known to exist, but practically inaccessible. This call, repeated and intensified, sounded above the war-drums of the civil war. A tardy Congress, by act of May 15, 1862, established the Bureau of Agriculture, declaring its object to be "to acquire and diffuse . . . useful information on subjects connected with agriculture in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word." The subsequent history and present status of this bureau are known to all.

The great struggle referred to was barely over when another interest of universal concern developed under state auspices, was demanding the beneficent interference of the national government in a similar way. By a law approved March 2, 1867, the Bureau of Education was created. The phrasing of the act is interesting, ... 66 to collect facts and statistics showing the condition and progress of education in the several states, and to diffuse . . . information respecting the organization and management of schools and school systems, and methods of teaching." The splendid series of publications emanating from the Bureau of Education, already indispensable to every student of pedagogy, bears ample testimony to the wisdom of Congress, and to the intelligence and industry of the gentlemen who have been charged with its administration.

It is a curious fact worth momentary notice that our first Commissioner of Education in these annual reports undertook to collect facts relating to the insane, the idiotic, and the deaf, dumb, and blind, and argued in the body of his first report that the culture, if not the maintenance, of these classes falls legitimately within the province of his bureau.

A few years later Congress was constrained to respond to a third call loud and clear for the same kind of service, and the Bureau of Labor was brought into being by act of June 27, 1884.

The function of this bureau as fixed by the law is to "collect information upon the subject of labor, its relation to capital, the hours