News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 30, 1914

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

—On the evening of July 15, Gen. Victoriano Huerta resigned from the provisional presidency of the Mexican Republic, in favor of Francisco Carbajal. He at once boarded a special train for Puerto Mexico, and sailed for Europe on the German steamer “Dresden,” July 21. A settlement of differences between the constitutionalist leaders and the new provisional president, Carbajal, leading to the final pacification of Mexico, is now anxiously awaited.

—A petition drafted by prisoners in the Eastern Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, asserting that fully seventy per cent of the crime in that State is directly attributable to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors and asking for the enactment of prohibition legislation, has been circulated among the convicts confined in that institution. It is reported that 1,500 signatures of inmates of the prison will be attached to the petition, which is to be presented to the legislature.

—The blindness and uselessness of moles has been proverbial for countless decades. But now a change in the estimate of the mole has come. Mole breeding has become a very profitable industry. In Holland moles are raised for the profit their skins will bring on the market. Their fur is plush-like, velvety, and soft, similar to sealskin. The mole-breeding industry is only about five years old, and it sprang up in the neighborhood of Amsterdam, Holland. But now an American farmer of Baltimore County, Maryland, has gone into the business, and it yielded $9,000 last year. Moles are said to devour insects that would be very destructive, so they are not so useless as the generations have thought; they are of value both dead and alive.

—A new plan for the popular promotion of high ideals of citizenship emanates from the headquarters of the United Society of Christian Endeavor in Boston, where, with the hearty support of his colleagues, the citizenship superintendent of the society, Daniel A. Poling, has elaborated an appeal for universal observance of “Good Citizenship Day” in the United States on Sunday, Oct. 18, 1914. To the consciousness of Christian Endeavorers and other church people Mr. Poling says this day must be “Christian Citizenship Day.” But in order to leave the door open for the cooperation of all civic and social organizations, it is proposed in all public advertising of the idea to name it, as already indicated, simply Good Citizenship Day. Mr. Poling’s hope is that all the methods which have been developed so successfully in so many communities for the celebration of Go-to-Church Sunday will be reinvoked for the observance of this day, and that everybody sympathetic with civic righteousness will be drawn to church on this occasion to hear sermons on the moral obligations of American patriotism, and to join with popular measures their concerted interest in moral reform.