these questions, instead of allowing that privilege to counsel. Practically the only function of importance accorded to the advocate in the trial is that of a concluding argument. Very little is probably accomplished by an appeal to minds long since made up; but an opportunity is at least offered for the display and study of oratory. Exceptions to adverse rulings of the court are taken much as is done with us, and errors thus assigned are subject to review in the appellate courts on writs of error or bills of review. Ample power is also vested in all courts to preserve dignity by means of punishments for contempt, and many an advocate who has been too persistent in seeking to propound questions or open up inquiries deemed improper by the occupants of the bench, has been made to feel the exercise of this power. As a rule, however, the German counsel seems to be duly docile, and content to allow the members of the court to perform that labor which we would conIsider to be his.

A brief reference now to the administration of German criminal law, and we will close this branch of our subject. Generally speaking, prosecutions for crime in the German Empire are more speedy and sure of results than with us, but the penalties inflicted are lighter. There are few cases of even atrocious crimes in which the ingenuity of German judges cannot find some "mitigating circumstances; "a rule which finds an apparent exception in prosecutions for lèse majesté, for a party who in a fit or drunken rage destroyed an inanimate bust of Kaiser William I. was in recent years condemned to three years penal servitude, while over ninety per cent. of the convictions for the not infrequent offense of "criminal assault," escape with terms of less than two years each.

In Germany, the functions of our grand juries are assumed by the state's attorneys and their assistants. Complaints are lodged with these officials and are then probed into by examining magistrates. Much criticism has recently been indulged in concerning the methods employed by the latter, being favorably compared to those practiced by the ancient inquisition; and hope is expressed that the impending revision of the criminal code will work a muchneeded limitation upon the somewhat arbitrary powers and methods of these magistrates.

Trials for minor offenses take place before the court with the aid of a couple of lay judges, changed from term to term. Cases of felony are tried with the aid of juries, consisting of twelve good men and true. The methods of trial do not differ much from those

employed in civil causes.

The judges have the witnesses admitted one by one, administer a solemn oath, and examine each in accordance with the prescribed formula; but whenever a grave charge is advanced by the witness, his statement is interrupted by the court, the defendant ordered to stand up in the box and make such explanation as he can of the damaging statement. He may, of course, decline to respond, but the effect upon the jury is equivalent to an admission of guilt. He is therefore necessarily driven to lying, if guilty; but the law mercifully exempts him from the further penalty of perjury, because he is not under oath. In the course of the trial, the advocate who represents the defendant (because the state will furnish him such, if he be without means) cuts much the same figure as counsel in a civil cause. Unless he be constructed along very aggressive and independent lines, he will allow the course of examination to run on uninterruptedly, reserving all his ammunition for the concluding argument to the jury, as to which he is allowed some little latitude. The final step in the trial is a charge by the court to the jury, formulated much after the fashion of a charge in our United States courts, and which is subject to review by the appellate courts. An acquittal is no bar to a further prosecution in Germany, but it can only be had upon new facts conclusively pointing to the guilt of the defendant. For an unsuccessful second prosecution the defendant is entitled to redress out of the public treasury.

In Germany a system of cumulative sentences in criminal causes seems to be in vogue which strikes the uninitiated at least as peculiar if not ludicrous. Sentence of death is but rarely imposed, yet when it is, we usually find it rendered still more terrible by the addition of other penalties. Last year a young man was tried in the city of Giessen for a particularly atrocious murder charged to have been committed by him. Being found guilty, it was ordered that on a certain day he be decapitated, that he should be confined in the public penitentiary for five years and be deprived of his civil rights for a period of ten years. Shortly before our departure from Europe, the newspapers reported that the first part of this sentence had been properly executed, but I have not learned what the sheriff proposes to do about the remaining penalties.

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS.

BY JOHN R. Dos Passos,1

OF THE NEW YORK BAR.

It is well enough to remember that Wall street is not the United States and that the American nation has not gone to pieces. On the contrary, it never was so wealthy, prosperous and solid. This panic started through a fear, not of what had occurred, but of what might occur. Wall Street thought it saw ghosts in the future, and it began selling shares and bonds six months ago in anticipation of some dire results. Nobody threatened to tear up the railroad tracks, to stop the enormous traffic upon land and water, to close the manufacturing industries, to bid the earth close up her fruitful womb and produce no more of her manifold treasures.

No. The pursuit of a few aggressors of the law has been the pretext of this attack upon American securities, and the fire, once started, has pursued its ruinous course until thousands of innocent people have been ruined, confidence driven from our markets and by leaps and bounds it has reached a point where the rottenness of the financial methods of some trust companies has been uncovered, and all general, financial and commercial business interests temporarily threatened.

MR. LAWSON'S CHARGES.

Of course, the real causes of the panic are manifold. They are quite independent of any action on the part of Mr. Roosevelt,

Mr. Dos Passos has been a lawyer of prominence in the more important financial litigation in New York for the last twenty years, and is an authority on constitutional and on stock-exchange questions. He has written some books of wide recognition, such as "The Interstate Commerce Law," "The Law of Stock Brokers and Stock Exchanges," and "The American Lawyer as He Was, as He Is, and as He Can Be," the last of which was reviewed in Vol. 7, No. 2, of THE BRIEF. The discussion of the financial crisis above was given to the Paris Edition of the New York Herald as Mr. Dos Passos was leaving Europe in November, and besides sounding a timely warning, adds suggestions of great value as derived from his long and intimate experience.

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although that may have precipitated what was bound eventually to

come.

The exposure of systematic corporate corruption and illegality was first circumstantially made by Mr. Thomas W. Lawson, who, whatever else may be said of him, has always coupled his extraordinary and desperate charges against corporation wrongdoing with a full admission that he was engaged in stock speculation. Mr. Lawson opened up the illegal methods of the Standard Oil Company and of the life insurance companies before Mr. Roosevelt was elected President. The Elkins Act, under which the Standard Oil Company was convicted, was passed in 1903, before he assumed office. If the conviction of men, in accordance with constitutional forms, is to be made the basis of financial panics, we had better put up the shutters and close the business of keeping a government. The great misfortune and weakness of our dealings. in securities is that there is no conservatism. We are either climbing hills of seas, Olympus high, or ducking down as low as Hell's from Heaven.

THE STOCK EXCHANGE.

Now, while we have been going at a tremendous pace for a number of years, and a halt and reaction were inevitable, there was no necessity for the pendulum to swing in the regions of destruction. Nothing in the inherent conditions of our country justified it. But the ball once started, the extraordinary methods of business carried on in the New York Stock Exchange did the rest. The whole control of the prices of the American securities rests in the hands of that irresponsible (I mean in a legal sense) body.

Irresponsible, I say, because it is not incorporated, nor amenable to any judicial tribunal, or corrective or supervisory jurisdiction. Its figures and values have therefore been accepted as indisputable. What is done there affects the property of innocent people who have no participation in the transactions. If the loss, or benefit, of transactions could be confined to stock jobbers on the Exchange, nobody could find fault. But why outsiders should have an arbitrary and false value put upon their property by these professional dealers is altogether anomalous.

STOCK METHODS MUST CHANGE.

The time has come, it seems to me, when Stock Exchange operations must submit to a change, conformable to existing conditions and the vast interests which it seeks to represent.

Through its methods of conducting business prices have shrunk far away from their inherent values, and the fortunes of thousands of innocent individuals have either been decimated or swept away. It is utterly unconceivable and astonishing that the savage and brutal system of dealing in securities should have existed so long. The spectacle of the so-called buying and selling of securities, exhibited in the daily sessions of the New York Stock Exchange, present a picture that would make barbarians blush. There is no bargaining, no preliminaries, no exchanging of prices or terms, no system or method-no order-only a confused mass of gentlemanly sluggers, with voices like fog-horns, madly tumbling together, a few undistinguishable words uttered. Prices are made and millions upon millions of dollars lost or won, sometimes, by the mere chances of dexterity or proximity of position.

STRICT CONTROL IS NEEDED.

Of course, this body, which in times of excitement becomes a mere commercial temple of Janus, should close when securities are not based upon values, but when prices simply represent the caprices or boldness of the bears, or when everything is sacrificed or slaughtered to a spirit of temporary madness. The worse features of the system grow out of the indiscriminate and unchecked right to sell stocks "short" and that other modern devil of stock jobbing, known as "stop orders." Of course, speculation cannot be stopped, but operations which wantonly destroy the property of thousands of innocent investors can be regulated, just as the selling of liquor and the practice of prostitution are controlled. Gambling, rum-drinking and prostitution can never be wholly erased from any community, no matter how civilized, but they can be controlled, if not made comparatively innocuous to the general public.

Selling stock "short," under conditions which now exist, is the most infamous practice of the age, and in New York it is, par excellence, carefully protected and guarded by special statute!

A "bear" is one who lives upon lies, exaggerations and the misfortunes of life. When he takes up his journal in the morning and finds that no misfortune is chronicled, his day is destroyed. He has a stomach-ache. He sells property which he does not own, and his utmost effort, after he has sold it, is to depress it, so as to buy it back at a profit. "Stop order" gambling is playing shares on a limit. An individual says to a broker, in effect: "I'll wager a thousand dollars, and when that amount is exhausted you must close the transaction." Accumulated "stop orders" mash the