News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Apr 15, 1915

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— According to statistics which have been compiled, 85,000 babies have been born in Belgium since the start of the war, and these births have been under conditions which have caused a frightful mortality to mothers and offspring.

— At least seventy lives are believed to have been lost at sea in the storm that swept the Atlantic coast April 3. It is probable that full reports will add to the death list.

— Shrinkage in the net income of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company for 1914 as compared with 1913 amounted to $7,830,067. Unfavorable commercial and financial conditions accentuated by the war in Europe are the chief reasons assigned for the decline.

— Switzerland has a new president, Giuseppe Motta. There are three notable things about his accession to the presidency: he is the first Italian-speaking citizen and the first Roman Catholic who has held the office of president; he is also the youngest man who has ever held the office.

— The concentration of picked troops around the Chinese capital has been practically completed. A hundred thousand men with artillery reserves are now distributed along the railways, and the roads to Peking are completely barred. It is reported that Japan has occupied strategic positions at Mukden and Tsinan.

— On May 1, 1915, a party of fifty leading Chinese merchants, bankers, and officers are expected to arrive in San Francisco, Cal. They come to America to study our financial and political life. Their tour of this country will mean an 11,000-mile trip occupying seventy days and including every part of the United States.

— The State of Vermont has taken from the Carrara district, Italy, the honor of being the world's greatest marble-producing field. The vein of marble in Vermont is fifty-seven miles long and from 1,650 to 2,200 feet in width. The grade of marble is equal to earth's finest. Great quantities are being taken from the vein.

— A telegraph machine which is worked like a typewriter at the sending end and the message from which comes out on a printed sheet at the receiving end, has been installed in the offices of the Associated Press and the New York morning newspapers. The efficiency of the new machine is considered to be fifty per cent greater than the mere man operator.

— The siege of Przemysl was the longest in modern warfare. It began on Sept. 2, 1914, on the very day that the Russians defeated the Austrians before Lemberg, and with few intervals of rest, continued for 201 days—or for 100 days longer than the siege of Port Arthur in 1904; 71 days longer than the siege of Paris in 1870-71, and 51 days longer than the siege of Adrianople in 1912-13.

— Perhaps no other section of the world has felt so keenly the devastating effects of the European war on business as have the nations of South America. Customs revenues have fallen off two thirds, the personnel of governments has been reduced, salaries cut down, public works stopped, and other forms of retrenchment adopted. These facts have drawn South American governments to the United States as never before, and indicate that the Pan-American Financial Conference, which President Wilson has called for Washington on May 24, will prove a historic assembly for the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

— The world's largest typewriter, an Underwood, is on exhibition at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, Cal. It is 1,728 times larger than the standard machine. It looks much more like a great organ than like the ordinary typewriter. The letters are three inches high and space two inches. The machine is twenty-one feet wide and fifteen feet high and weighs fourteen tons. Two years were required for its construction at a cost of $100,000.

— According to the statistics made public by the state department of mines, more than 1,000 miners lost their lives in the mines of Pennsylvania in 1914. Six hundred men and boys were killed in the anthracite mines, and 413 in the bituminous region. This loss of life, heavy and sad as it is, is a decrease of 198 over the year 1913. The total production of coal in the State of Pennsylvania for the year was 237,251,835 tons. The number of persons employed in and about the mines last year was 376,831.

— The total net revenue of all steam railroads of the United States with operating revenues of more than $100,000 for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1914, was given at $845,216,654, in a report made public last week by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Operating revenues for the same period were $3,047,019,908, and operating expenses $2,200,313,159, with a net deficit from outside operations of $1,490,095. The net corporate income was given at $347,206,000. Operating revenues for the same period in 1913 were $3,122,115,798, with operating expenses of $2,169,968,924.

— The Women's Council of St. Louis, Mo., composed of fifty-four organizations and clubs, will erect an office building in the down-town district from which men will be barred as tenants and employees. Women will run the elevators and officiate as window cleaners and janitors. If the announcement is accurate, they will also look after the boilers and the machinery in the cellar. The architect will be a woman, but the actual builders presumably will be men, since the feminine invasion has not yet extended to the occupations of steel frame erector, riveter, bricklayer, and carpenter. Excavating also is man's work, and the materials must be purchased from masculine firms. But the intention seems to be to construct, so far as possible, a monument to the new feminism.

— The brotherhood societies of London, of which there are 300, with a total membership of 66,000, have started a novel patriotic campaign, for which Lord Kitchener has supplied the watchword. Strictly following the lead of the field marshal secretary of war, the brotherhood council of war has drawn up the following pledge: "In order that I may be of the greatest service to my country at this time of national peril, I promise until the end of the war to abstain from all intoxicants, and to encourage others to do the same." It is pointed out that while the nation raised $15,000,000 in eight weeks for a relief fund, $17,500,000 is spent on drink in less than eight days. Every week brewers and distillers use up 73,000,000 pounds of grain, 3,000,000 pounds of rice or maize, and 9,500,000 pounds of sugar or sugar equivalent.

— King George of England has added his plea to that of the shipowners, and, in some cases, that of the laborers themselves, that some vigorous measures be adopted to cope with the question of drunkenness, which, it is urged, is having the effect of delaying the delivery of munitions of war. The king has volunteered, if it is considered advisable, personally to give up the use of all alcoholic liquors and to issue an order against their use in the royal household.

— President Wilson and former-President Taft were the central figures at the laying of the corner stone of an $800,000 marble home for the American Red Cross at Washington on March 27. The building will be erected as a memorial to the heroic women of the Civil War. The President did not deliver an address, but personally supervised the laying of the corner stone. The building is to be completed by April, 1916. Congress appropriated $400,000 for it, and the additional $400,000 was raised by private subscriptions.

— Fred E. Woodward, of Washington, D. C., contributes to the current number of the Scientific American an interesting chart showing the number of books published last year in the United States and England, classified according to subjects. Fiction and religion occupied the leading place, but Mr. Woodward points out that the demand for fiction has been falling off in recent years. The grand total for the year 1914 was 12,010, just 220 less than the total for the year 1913. Of this number 10,175 were actually new books and 1,835 were new editions. American authors contributed 8,563 of this total, and foreign authors, mostly English, the remainder.

— Foodstuffs are now being shipped to Germany by parcel post. By way of the Chicago post office over 1,000 packages containing edibles of all sorts have been sent in the past two weeks to Germany and Austria. The shipments are being sent by individuals here to individuals over there. The packages are said to contain tea, coffee, sugar, flour, and, in fact, about every kind of foodstuff except meats and sausage, and they are nearly all up to the legal limit of eleven pounds. They go by way of Amsterdam on the Holland-American line. There is no duty paid in the United States on such shipments. There is no violation of the neutrality laws in this, inasmuch as the goods are not sent to any administration or to the field of battle, but from individuals to individuals.

— At the Mexican Peace Conference held some weeks ago a permanent peace committee was appointed. The committee has proposed as a peace plan for Mexico, a form of commission government to have supreme power in Mexico until elections can be held and a constitutional president inaugurated. To secure the support of all factions this peace plan provides that the three supreme commissioners be selected by a board of directors, composed of representatives of each recognized party. The commission is "to have extraordinary facilities without other limit than the salvation of independence and national integrity, and is to be responsible to congress for its acts." The plan also provides for agrarian reforms which have been a central feature of every revolution in Mexico.

— The death of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, first Baron Rothschild, head of the British branch of the great banking firm, occurred at his London residence on March 31.

— Ohio wants a larger yield of farm products. So she induced about 1,300 of her farmers to attend classes in the State university in Columbus to help them bring about these results. President Thompson, of the university, prepared a program especially adapted to the farmers. He says that a few days spent in the classroom will mean more corn for Ohio. Among those in attendance was a man eighty years of age, who took every lecture on the program. In order to bring so large a number of agriculturists together, extensive advertising was carried on throughout the State, billboards, newspapers, and magazines being used to draw attention to what was called Farmers' Week. The only requisite for a seat in the lecture rooms and a place in the laboratories was the payment of a nominal fee. The experiment has proved successful.

— No longer will U. S. fleet commanders in foreign waters, with superior naval strength, be placed in the embarrassing position of being unable to take supreme command of a united force, owing to the presence of an admiral or vice admiral of some other navy. By passing a law creating the grade of admiral, Congress has made it possible for the navy to receive at all times the recognition it deserves—an act of especial importance just now, with the complicated international situation. President Wilson, acting under the provisions of this new law, designated as admirals, last week, Rear Admirals Fletcher, Howard, and Cowles, commanders in chief respectively of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic fleets, who rank in the above order also as to seniority. Aside from Admiral Dewey, the hero of Manila, who as "admiral of the navy" enjoys a unique rank in naval history, no other American naval officers have been privileged to hold the rank of admiral except Farragut from 1866 to 1870, and Porter from 1870 to 1891. Three vice admirals are also to be appointed under the provisions of the new law.