Every person appointed to office, as well as those elected by the people, had to be examined physically, mentally and morally in the same manner as those applying for a license to practice a profession or desiring to marry. All were placed on the same footing. The law for divorce was enforced by the Department of Health, as doctors were, from their knowledge of human frailty, the best judges to decide whether a man and woman should live together in the married state or be separated, and while the law provided for a compulsory decree of divorce for adultery, which was a felony, it also allowed divorce for incompatibility of temperament. A court of six Government physicians, three males and three females, heard all divorce cases in every district. The Minister of Health gave me the reasons why the marriage law was passed fixing twenty-one years of age as the time when young men and women could marry. He said it was done to allow the youths of both sexes to become well acquainted with one another before being united in marriage, and also to be well trained in useful callings, so that both parties to the marriage contract would be able to assist each other, for many an innocent young girl had ruined her life by marrying a man at an age when she was ignorant of the duties of wifehood and motherhood, "but by keeping our boys and girls in training schools until they are eighteen and then teaching them trades in the Army until they are twenty-one years of age we fit them for the duties of life." CHAPTER XVIII. A VISIT TO THE MINISTER OF STATE. Before returning to the United States of America I called on the Minister of State, who is also the presiding officer of the Parliament, and told him that I would regard it as a great favor if he would tell me how such changes had taken place in the Government of his country, "for," said I, "from what I read about your Government when I was a boy it was an absolute monarchy, and one man's will was the law of the land." "You have the key to the problem in that statement," he replied, "for I am free to confess that it would have taken centuries to have brought about our present system of government under so-called democracy. Near the middle of the last century an absolute ruler in our country by a stroke of his pen freed twenty-three millions of slaves, while in your country it required four years of bloody war at a cost of ten thousand millions of dollars and the lives of one million of brave men, and through the widespread demoralization that ensued through your bravest and best being killed or giving to the corrupt element in your country (for a dishonest man is always a coward) the opportunity to inaugurate a reign of monopoly where graft and bribery flourishes and the slave element that you freed are a menace (and will be as long as they remain in the country) to society.