News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Feb 25, 1915

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— It is announced that the formal opening of the Panama Canal has been postponed from March 12 to July 4, and perhaps later. Battleships cannot now be sent through the waterway in safety.

— The parliament of Iceland, thirty-four of whose forty members are elected by popular suffrage, has passed a measure forbidding the sale of alcoholic liquors. All the remaining stock in the Danish dependency has been exported.

— The Central Christian Advocate says: “Roman Catholics are in the majority in the city councils of more than 15,000 cities and towns in the United States, and in all incorporated communities of 10,000 or more inhabitants an average of more than eighty-five per cent of the police are Roman Catholics.”

— What will be known as the Rocky Mountain National Park has been created by action of Congress. The new park is near Denver and includes Longs Peak. It has an area of about 700 miles, and includes cañons, mountain lakes, valleys, and mountain peaks. It can be reached by most of the large railroads running west, and is a little over a day’s journey from Chicago. The new park will include a part of Estes Park, which is visited annually by about 30,000 visitors.

— In a well-phrased message, which argued that the “literacy test” would “all but close entirely the gates of asylum,” which have hitherto remained open in America to the politically oppressed from the rest of the world, President Wilson recently returned the immigration bill to Congress with his veto. The principal reason given by the President for setting his will against that of Congress, aside from his personal conviction, was that the American people had never passed upon the issue involved.

— In a collision near the Fenwick Shoals lightship on January 26 the American-Hawaiian line freight steamship “Washingtonian” was sunk, and the American schooner “Elizabeth Palmer,” which rammed her, was abandoned with decks awash. The “Washingtonian” had a crew of forty men aboard. She left Honolulu, bound for Delaware breakwater on December 20, with a full cargo of sugar, passing through the Panama Canal January 18. The value of the ship and cargo the superintendent placed at $1,500,000. Captain Carlisle valued the “Elizabeth Palmer” at $125,000.

— Washington women, assisted by women from all parts of the country, are to erect a memorial to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson in the capital city. It will take the form of a model block of tenement houses which may be rented to the poor at a low figure. Mrs. Wilson, it will be recalled, was intensely interested in the “alley people”—those who live in unsightly and insanitary places in Washington. One of the last wishes expressed by her was that these could be done away, and Congress in the last hours of her illness passed a measure which obliterated the twenty-three miles of these dwellings, which means 278 alleys, where 10,000 persons live. The model block will include a municipal washhouse, a day home for the children of working women, and other features in which Mrs. Wilson was especially interested.

— That the United States government faces a deficit—estimated in some quarters as high as $80,000,000—for the present fiscal year, and that the expenditures for next year will exceed the revenues by a much greater amount unless a vigorous policy of retrenchment is adopted immediately by Congress and officials of the administration, came to light last week. Appropriations by Congress, chiefly in rivers and harbors and public buildings bills, the enactment of an income tax law without definite information as to the amount of revenue it would produce, the disastrous effects of the European war on the customs collections, the failure of the war tax law to develop the returns expected, and the constantly increasing cost of operating the government departments, are the chief reasons for the situation.