in a condition almost of servitude; they did service, were not paid wages, and couldn't leave the place where they were born--and both these are tests of slavery. But in the first two centuries after the Conquest the number of freemen very rapidly increased; men who were not property owners, not land-owners, but still freemen. Especially it increased in the towns, for the towns very early established their right to be free, far earlier than the country. It was very early established that the citizens of any town, that is, the members of the guild of the town, duly admitted to the guild, were freemen, and probably before this statute. But this is interesting as a recognition of the fact that there were free poor people--people without property, who nevertheless were neither villeins nor serfs--and that they were entitled to equality before the law, just as we are to-day, as early as 1275. Otherwise, the Statute of Westminster concerns mainly the criminal law. There is one very important provision--because it has been historically followed from then down to now--that there shall be no disturbance of the elections. Elections shall be free and unimpeded, uncontrolled by any power, either by the crown, or Parliament, or any trespasser. That has been a great principle of English freedom ever since, and passed into our unwritten constitution over here, and of course has been re-enacted in many of our laws. That is the feeling which lay behind those statutes which we enacted after our slaves were freed, for the making of elections free in the South; for protecting negroes in the act of voting and preventing interference with them by the Ku Klux Klan. The Democratic party strongly objected and objects still to such legislation on the part of the government, on the ground that the right of regulating elections belongs to the States and not to the Federal government; which, constitutionally speaking, before the Fifteenth Amendment at least, was true. They do not, of course, deny this great old English principle that elections must be free and must not be intimidated or controlled by anybody; but, they say, we left the machinery of the elections in the hands of the States when we adopted the Federal Constitution; and although at our State elections some of the officers elected are Federal officers--as, for instance, the President of the United States, or rather the presidential electors, and members of Congress--nevertheless, when we adopted the Federal Constitution, the founders chose to rely for the machinery of a fair and free election upon the officers of States; so that the Federal government has nothing to do with it, and has no business to send Federal troops to the South; and they called such bills the "force" bill. In theory, of course, those elections were controlled in these bills just as much in the North as in the South; but there being practically no complaint in the North that the negroes were not allowed to vote, as a matter of