ifornia." The Duchess of Gandia subscribed
$60,000 for the same purpose in 1767 and many others followed the same
example until the "Pius Fund of the Missions of California" amounted
to over two million dollars. At the time of the Secularization of the
Missions, the Mexican Government confiscated a large remaining portion
of this "Pious Fund." In 1853 the Spanish Archbishop Alemany, then
Bishop of Monterey and successor of Bishop Diego from whom the "Pious
Fund" had been taken, started a litigation which was continued in turn
by his worthy successor Archbishop Patrick Riordan of the archdiocese of
San Francisco, with the good result that Mexico was made to pay the sum
of $43,050 in Mexican currency annually as the interest at six per cent
on the sum of $1,460,682 of the "Pious Fund" which the national treasury
of Mexico had appropriated on the promise of Mexico to act as trustee of
the fund and pay an interest of six per cent which it had failed to pay
since its appropriation at the time of the Mexican regime in California.
Moreover, Mexico had agreed to pay this interest to the object intended
by the donors of the fund, namely, "to the church, for the conversion
of the natives of California, for the establishment, maintenance and
extension of the Catholic Church, her faith and worship, in said country
of Upper and Lower California." The litigation was won through the
intervention of the United States Government which Archbishop Riordan
invoked through his counsel, and decided by arbitrators under the Hague
Convention in 1899. The first payment was made on February 2, 1903.

Perhaps it is not amiss to quote here a small portion of the speech
delivered in Washington, D. C. by Hon. Joseph Scott of Los Angeles on
the occasion of a banquet following the unveiling ceremonies of the
memorial erected in honor of Christopher Columbus by Act of Congress.
Among the speakers present at the banquet were Ex-President William
Taft (then president), Cardinal Gibbons, Speaker Champ Clark, Ex-speaker
Joseph Cannon, Congressman Underwood, Judge Victor Dowling of the
Supreme Court of New York and many other notable men of the nation.

"It affords me unbounded pleasure to have an opportunity to deliver an
expression, feeble though it be, of the sentiments of the Knights of
Columbus of the great West, and particularly of California, regarding
the significance of this great day. Mr. John Barrett of the Pan-American
Union has already given yo