general lawlessness and make its name a byword for horror, was galling.

So when, on November 21, the State opened its first case, not many hours had passed before Attorney-General McCall found himself on trial.

It came in this wise:

The State, prosecuting one Shelby Gregory for an alleged participation in the kidnapping of Annie Mae Simmons, the Negro woman, who in July, 1925, had been abducted and beaten by five unmasked white men, introduced evidence of a confession. The voluntary nature of the confession was attacked by the defense. Gregory, on the stand, swore that he had been threatened and abused by the Attorney-General in jail. And Mr. McCall found it necessary to take the witness chair to testify in substantiation of his own evidence.

Not a Crenshaw County jury that ever sat would have convicted that defendant!

The next defendant tried was Thaxton Miller, who faced a similar charge growing out of a severe beating given one Travis Bozeman in July, 1926. Twelve masked and robed men had taken him from a car as he returned from church. Miller's counsel introduced evidence of an alibi, which was combated by the State. The defendant was acquitted.

That night the Attorney-General withdrew from the cases, leaving all further prosecution to the solicitor who had requested his assistance. He was whipped; and frankly said so.

That and more. For in the statement which he issued at the time of his withdrawal he flatly charged that officers of the State Law Enforcement Bureau-a contemporary State department exercising police powers-had shown themselves more zealous in the interests of the defense than in the prosecution. He charged to them an utter lack of coöperation with his department in its work.

And as food for thought he disclosed that a copy of a report, made by officers of the Bureau to Governor Bibb Graves on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Crenshaw, had been found by his own men in the safe of the Exalted Cyclops of the Klavern whose activities were under investigation. And the day beforethat speculation may have its guide posts-the contents of a let

ter found side by side with the report in the Klavern safe had become public property through the medium of a subpoena ordering that another missive, to which it was a reply, be brought into

court.

The letter was from James Esdale, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, and was addressed to Ira B. Thompson, Exalted Cyclops of the Luverne Klavern, in whose safe it was found. In it Mr. Esdale stated that he agreed with Mr. Thompson that it was high time something be done "to bring the Attorney-General to his senses" and to let him know "that the people of Alabama elected him to run the Attorney-General's office and not spend all his time around here working up police court cases against the Ku Klux Klan".

Further, Mr. Esdale wrote Mr. Thompson, he would speak to Governor Graves on the matter, in doing which he felt full confidence that the Chief Executive would give his full coöperation as he has so nobly done in the past".

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The letter antedated the report with which it was found.

Governor Graves, however, declined to speak concerning it. And Walter K. McAdory, Chief of the State Law Enforcement Bureau, also maintained silence. In consequence the suggested channel of thought remains to a high degree speculative.

But the people of Crenshaw County, perhaps, were not in error when they read a political significance into the events occurring about them. The gentlemen concerned were Klansmen. The Klan was under attack. And it is a notorious fact that the acorns fall with the oak.

III

So it happened in Crenshaw County that the vaunted cases of the State fell flat. In their collapse not one word of evidence was introduced in court, nor was it submitted elsewhere, that the outrages described by the Grand Jury had not occurred. Nor was there evidence which related to the Grand Jury's indictment of the Ku Klux Klan. At the close of court the charges against the order stood unproved and uncontradicted: the evidence which constituted their basis a part of the secret records of the investigating body.

Calvin Poole, the Solicitor of the Second Judicial Circuit, the nominal prosecutor in the Crenshaw County Circuit Court, analyzed the situation which ended the State's efforts in Crenshaw when he withdrew the remaining cases "until such time as a different sentiment shall prevail in the county".

Attorney-General McCall had been tried in the stubborn minds of the white citizens of Crenshaw, and found guilty. His cases shattered against a stone wall of public opinion.

Perhaps it was that he did not understand to the fullest the thought and life of the people on whom he must rely to obtain convictions, and their inevitable reaction to his work in the county.

Before he left he understood.

And by a patent example he was made aware of another fundamental attribute to the make-up of the native, backwoods Alabamian, which no doubt played its part in the debacle of the trials and which certainly took a major rôle in the enactment of those brutal events which he investigated.

Shortly after his withdrawal from the cases, at about ten o'clock the same evening, he was in a car which drew up before a Luverne drug store. From the curb, while awaiting a package of cigarettes, he overheard a heated discussion between a group seven or eight within. The subject of the debate was the right to flog.

The thing speaks for itself.

of

FLAPPER VOTES AND LORDS' REFORM

BY JOHN GLADSTONE GRACE

QUAINT and picturesque personalities, attired in freakish cloaks, ancient hats, beards and collars are sometimes seen flitting like shadows through the corridors of the Scarlet Chamber. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind so far back, almost to the twilight of time, as the present British House of Lords. Viewed from the constitutional angle, the British Empire is still in the making, while the House of Lords is obviously out of tune with the times. It is not wild anarchy's call that threatens the Chamber of Peers. The status and standards of the British masses are rising. The age of class distinction as marked by dress is passing among men.

At a recent conference in Ottawa of the nine Provincial Prime Ministers, they discussed Second Chamber reforms, but unanimously disapproved of the abolition of either the Dominion Senate or House of Lords. In June, 1927, the British Peers themselves took up the question of revision and reconstruction of that ancient Parliament, when the vote stood two hundred and eight to fifty-four in favor of a "reasonable measure of Reform.' They would probably reject a Franchise bill lowering the voting age for women from thirty years to twenty-one.

Need I recall history to show how women without votes rocked thrones, empires and dynasties? The American and Canadian women are keenly interested in the British campaign which promises to turn on the votes of the young girls. The archives, vaults and closets of the ancient Peers may be pried open, and the six Queens of Henry VIII and the wives of George IV may pass in review. The House of Lords had high international recognition and was functioning when Marie Antoinette of France was executed for her follies, but then she ruined the old Bourbon régime. Nell Gwyn of England held sway over the Court of Charles II, and was popular with the Lords because she did not interfere in

politics. Shall the United Kingdom be ruled by women? They have a majority of the votes, but soldiers and women, in Canada, Great Britain and the United States, proved to be unpopular candidates. Premier Baldwin may have lost track of figures. It is officially announced that he will introduce a sweeping Franchise Extension measure. The Socialists of Europe cheered at the English Reform Bill of 1832, but it only added 200,000 new votes. Queen Victoria was alarmed at the "one man one vote" measure of 1884, which gave the franchise to over 1,500,000 new voters. The Labor party and its women organizations insist, and the Prime Minister agrees, that 5,240,000 young, irresponsible girls shall now be added to the voters' lists.

The United States Senate, while elective, was modelled largely on the lines of the British House of Lords. Fundamentally they are somewhat different, for the United States Senate, which divides Executive authority with the President, was created to protect the small States from the big ones. No more than two Senators are allowed by the Constitution to any State, and thus Nevada with only 77,000 inhabitants is equal to New York with eleven million population. The House of Representatives represents the people, and the Senate the States. The Westminster Peers, and the Senators of the British Dominions, are appointed by the Crown for life, and are empowered to revise or reject all legislation except money appropriations. The Lords Spiritual comprise twenty-six Bishops, who are obliged to sit together, to wear sanctuary robes and lawn sleeves, the dress of the Established Church. The Lords Spiritual seldom take part in the debates, and contrary to the general impression in the United States and Canada, the Lords Temporal, or the lay Peers, look not with reverence but with disdain, more or less, on the Bishops. The hierarchy, with few exceptions, are the scions of obscure families, and are "baser born", to use the expression of one who once occupied the Woolsack and was Chancellor of the British Exchequer in the blazing Scarlet Chamber. The British nobility is divided into five degrees of rank, and all are represented in the seven hundred and forty members of the House of Lords, viz: Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount and Baron. The Peers were almost unanimous in the decision to exclude all women from their House.