By the law of April 24, whenever a workman is discharged, his employer must give him a letter stating the reason truly, under penalty of five hundred dollars fine and one year’s imprisonment, and such letter must be written, not printed, and the form and appearance of the stationery is carefully provided for and all secret marks forbidden.  Oklahoma is one of the eight-hour States, with the minimum average wage in public work, referred to above; and all contracts must be made on that basis.  Wages must be paid fortnightly in cash, by all persons or corporations engaged in mining or manufacturing.

Oklahoma is the test-tube of American legislative reactions.  We shall await with interest the legislation of 1911, as well as the effect of the laws we have summarized above.  In the meantime Oklahoma has presented to the constitutional lawyer the long-sought problem of whether a sovereign State once admitted to the Union is bound by the Act of Congress authorizing such admission.  The enabling act of Oklahoma required that its capital should be fixed at Guthrie and not moved for a period of years.  In May, 1910, within such period of limitation, by act of legislature, supplemented by a plebiscitum of the people and the executive action of Governor Haskell, the capital was removed to Oklahoma City, and the State seal conveyed there surreptitiously, in spite of the injunction of a Federal district court.  A more beautiful American constitutional question could hardly be presented.  It may not at first seem to the reader so important, but when he considers that, for instance, Utah and other Western States have abolished Mormonism in the same manner, or have agreed to give equal treatment to the Japanese and Chinese in the same manner—­by an enabling act of Congress, ratified and perpetuated in the State Constitution—­he will see the importance of the question.  It was anticipated in the writer’s work on constitutional law ("Federal and State Constitutions,” p. 186, note 8):  “The enabling acts admitting the eight new Western States usually provided against polygamy on account of the Mormon influence, and this, with other provisions concerning schools, etc., was made forever irrepealable without the consent of the United States; see Utah 3, 1.  This is probably only a moral obligation; a State when once admitted comes in with all the rights of the older States.  So far as this section is concerned, Utah could probably amend her Constitution and re-establish Mormonism to-morrow.”

European legislation is necessarily more elaborate because there is usually no body of existing common law.  Trades-unions are universally made lawful, as they are with us.  But in France in certain cases the consent of the government to the formation of such organizations is necessary; and the Code Napoleon made unlawful all combinations of persons with an “evil end."[1] So, “full freedom of association” is now guaranteed in Switzerland; and in Germany the