News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 23, 1915

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— Thirty-nine of the leading college newspapers of the United States and Canada voted, at the recent annual convention of the Associated College Newspaper Publishers, to debar liquor advertisements of all kinds from their columns. These papers have a circulation of more than 100,000. Expulsion from the organization will be the punishment for violation of the new rule.

— Property damage estimated at $2,000,000 resulted from a fire which originated in a Chesapeake and Ohio grain elevator at Newport News, Va., about midnight, September 4, and spread to near-by buildings and to a big grain pier. The grain was being shipped to certain of the warring nations of Europe.

— That the Pennsylvania Railroad will offer the United States a reserve army of 100,000 men was the announcement made at Philadelphia recently. The plan of the officials is to grant every suitable employee a month's leave to go to any United States training camp the federal government may choose, for instruction.

— For the first time in our history, the United States has become the world's greatest exporter. During the last fiscal year, according to figures given out at Washington, American exports totaled $2,768,600,000 as compared with $2,170,100,000 for Great Britain, the next largest exporter. This was an increase of seventeen per cent for the United States, against a decrease of thirty per cent for Great Britain.

— Foreign influences in Haiti, working to block plans of the United States to pacify the republic and rehabilitate its finances under American supervision, made it necessary to declare martial law in Port au Prince, the capital, and in practically all but two of the country's open ports, on September 4. Rear Admiral Caperton, acting within his general instructions, explained that his action in declaring martial law was taken because of a situation that was beyond the control of the local government.

— The China Inland Mission has recently celebrated a half century of wonderful achievement. In that time it has baptized over 50,000 converts, more than 5,000 of these being baptized during the last year. It has established and maintains 754 local churches. Its 227 stations, with resident missionaries, and its 1,100 outstations, are established in fifteen of the original eighteen inland provinces of China, and are served by 1,036 consecrated men and women from twenty-two countries. The story of this mission will always remain one of the great romances of the modern movement for Christian world evangelization. The mission was founded in 1865 by J. Hudson Taylor.

— That recent discoveries and commercial arrangements have practically freed American industry of dependence on Germany for dyes, and have given American farmers a dependable source of potash fertilizers, was the announcement last week of Dr. Thomas H. Norton, of the Department of Commerce. According to Dr. Norton an American chemist, whose name is withheld, has perfected a new process for the manufacture of dyes from coal tar derivatives, which will make possible a reduction in the cost of present methods. At the same time an improved method of drying kelp for the production of potash has been worked out, and the product can be shipped from the Pacific coast, where it is manufactured, through the Panama Canal, and laid down on the gulf and Atlantic coasts at prices that will probably compare favorably with those quoted by Germans before the war.