p. 22 | Current Mention

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Feb 22, 1906

Current Mention

— A threatening eruption of Mount Vesuvius is in progress. The Funiculare Railway track leading up to the crater has been damaged in a number of places, and the principal station is threatened with destruction.

— Confirmation of reports of loss of life by a tidal wave following a submarine earthquake on January 31 has been brought to Panama by the steamer “Quito,” from Guayaquil. On January 31 several coast villages in the department of Cauca were destroyed, and more than fifty persons were killed or drowned. On the same day an earthquake lasting seven minutes was felt in the interior of Colombia.

— At a meeting of Methodist editors, publishers, and managers of the United States in Cincinnati, February 14, it was decided that every printing establishment controlled by the Methodist Book Concern shall hereafter be run on the “open-shop” plan, making no distinction between union and non-union workers. The decision applies practically to the printing plants in Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York. It was declared by those who spoke that since the open-shop plan had been introduced, there had been better service in every way, and that it would be absurd to think of ever restoring the alliance with the unions.

— Thomas W. Lawson, the Boston financier and writer on “frenzied finance,” who is making a fight for the control of two big insurance companies, the New York Life and the Mutual Life, claims to have 50,000 proxies given him by policy-holders in these companies, and has secured the signatures of seventeen State governors to a petition for a general investigation of New York life insurance companies. A prominent New York lawyer, Mr. Samuel Untermeyer, is reported to be Mr. Lawson’s legal adviser.

— The sentiment in Europe against interference by the United States in Old World politics is voiced by a Berlin paper, the Koelnische Volks-Leitung, organ of the clerical (Roman Catholic) party in the reichstag, which has great influence in German politics. The occasion of its present utterance is the part the United States is taking in the conference over Morocco. If the United States proclaims a Monroe doctrine for the Western hemisphere, it says, Europe must proclaim a similar doctrine debarring the United States from the Eastern hemisphere.

— A campaign has been started in Paris against the use of absinthe, an intoxicant more deadly in its effects than whisky. A press dispatch says: “The trades unions of France, especially of Paris, aided by the leading members of the Left Deputies, are getting up a national petition for the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of absinthe. The petition will be signed by a large number of prominent members of the Academy of Medicine. The petitioners point out that absinthe kills tens of thousands of people annually. More of it is consumed in France than in the rest of the world put together, and it is causing epilepsy, tuberculosis, madness, and crime.”

— Mr. W. D. Hunter, who is in charge of the government’s investigation of the cotton-boll weevil in the South has returned to Washington with a report which indicates that the problem of maintaining the price of cotton may safely be left to that insect for solution. He says: “Our latest reports show that the weevil this year has made his customary advance of fifty miles eastward. The unfavorable part of the present situation is that the late advance puts the pest in the lowlands along the Mississippi River, where conditions are most favorable to its existence. In Texas the low, wet sections were the ones that suffered most, and that have failed to rally after being once infected. Such are the lands along the Mississippi. In western Louisiana there was a belt in which no cotton was grown—a great timber belt. We endeavored to keep the boll weevil from getting past this belt, but have failed. The Mississippi River can not be regarded as a barrier, as the weevils have been known to fly twenty-five miles with a favorable wind, and as there is much traffic across the stream, it is sure to be carried in baggage.” It is only a question of time, says Mr. Hunter, when all the cotton-growing States will be affected.