The repeated and remarkable stipulations of the Constitution, reaching almost every conceivable exercise of religious action and freedom, present one of its most marked characteristics and radical departures from that of the United States. The latter contains only two allusions to the subject. The first in Article VI.: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The second in the first amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Previous to the Swiss Constitution of 1874 there was no mention of individual religious liberty. That of 1848 guaranteed the free exercise of divine worship to the recognized confessions, the Roman Catholic and the Reformed (_i.e._, the Church Reformed by Zwingli and Calvin), but forbade the order of Jesuits. It is manifest that the framers of the Constitution of 1874 were resolved to effectually suppress the further exercise of the ecclesiastical narrowness and sectarian antagonism which, as late as the Sonderbund War of 1847, disturbed the peace and threatened the stability of the Confederation. The extreme rigor with which these provisions of the Constitution are enforced, and the latitude of action given under them to Cantonal authority, do appear at times to be strained to an extent deaf to both humanity and common sense. In 1888, “Captain Stirling,” of the Salvation Army, a subject of Great Britain, was sentenced in the Canton of Vaud to one hundred days’ imprisonment in Chillon Castle for attempting to proselyte some children. The appeal made in her behalf to the Federal Council was refused, and she was compelled to complete the term of her sentence. Surely no danger was threatened that might not have been averted by her removal to the frontier, or the offence atoned for by a slight fine. The case presented an appeal to that unknown quantity, the Swiss sense of the ridiculous. The sanctity of the law is all very well; but when the law is one against persons who sing hymns to children in the street, and its terrors are those of Bonnivard’s prison, the plot of the drama seems hardly equal to the majesty of the scene. To put a young lady, for so trivial an offence, under triple bolts and bars for months is a piling up of the agony which indicates a singular weakness of dramatic resource. Perhaps the military style of the movements in these days of alarming concentrations on Continental frontiers may have invested the “colonels” and “captains” in the Salvationist train, even of the gentler sex, with undue importance and alarm. It is difficult to reconcile Federal and Cantonal action in Switzerland in this and other instances with the spirit of the inviolability of freedom of faith and conscience guaranteed by the Constitution. Religious liberty encounters no little restriction and abridgment in several of the Cantons. Each Canton has still its own