religious, charitable and other establishments in the Holy Places and elsewhere." The passage immediately following this paragraph in the article was overlooked: "The acquired rights of France are explicitly reserved, and there shall be no interference with the statu quo in the Holy Places." Thus the protection guaranteed to all ecclesiastics, etc., no matter what their nationality or religion, as well as the generally recognized right of all the powers to watch over this protection, was to be understood with the reservation of the "acquired rights" of France, i.e. of its ancient protectorate in behalf of Catholics. This protectorate was therefore really confirmed by the Treaty of Berlin. But as a matter of fact, the influence of Russia, which assumed the protectorate of Orthodox Christians, already greatly affected the standing which the ancient French Protectorate had assured to Catholics in Palestine and especially in Jerusalem. Moreover, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany installed Protestantism with a magnificent church beside the Holy Sepulchre in 1898. As a sort of compensation he ceded to German Catholics the site of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin which he obtained from the Sultan, where a church and a monastery were erected and, together with the other German establishments, placed under the protection of the German Empire, without deference to the ancient prerogative of France. A similar situation prevailed in China. First, in 1888, Germany obtained from the Chinese imperial Government that German passports should insure the same advantages to the missionaries as those secured at the French legation. At the same time the German Catholic missionaries of Shandong, who had much to endure from the infidels, were on several occasions offered the powerful protection of the German Empire. Mgr. Anzer, the vicar Apostolic, decided to accept it, after having, as he declares, several times sought unsuccessfully the aid of the French minister. In 1896 the German ambassador at Peking received from Berlin the command to support energetically the claims of the Catholic missionaries and even to declare that the German Empire would pledge itself to defend against all unjust oppression the persons and property of the mission of Shandong, together with freedom of preaching, in the same measure in which such had been formerly guaranteed by the French Protectorate. The murder of two of the Shandong missionaries in November 1897 afforded the occasion for a more solemn affirmation of the new protectorate, while it furnished