Current Mention

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 14, 1906

— Yellow fever has appeared at Havana, Cuba.

— A revolution is under way in Guatemala, which from latest accounts, seems to have a fair prospect of being successful.

— The recent decree of expulsion against Greeks residing in Roumania has led to the severance of diplomatic relations between that country and Greece.

— At the forty-third national convention at the United States Brewers’ Association, at Indianapolis, June 6, the brewers congratulated themselves upon the fact that the consumption of beer in this country is increasing four times as fast as the population.

— A Sunday-closing crusade has been started in Louisville, Ky., all places of business and amusement being tightly closed, and ball games prohibited. A Jew, however, who owns a pleasure resort, is allowed to do business on Sunday as usual. The Sunday law will be tested by the State courts.

— San Francisco experienced another sharp earthquake shock at eleven o’clock P. M., June 4, said to be the most severe since the great shock which destroyed the city. A dispatch states: “The new quake has affected public confidence in the future of San Francisco. Already several business houses which had prepared to rebuild have decided to drop their projects. They feel it would be foolhardy to risk more money here.”

— The coming Pan-American Congress is likely to prove a partial failure, owing to the attitude of Argentina and some other South American countries which refuse to admit the right of one nation to collect debts from another nation by force. These countries are dissatisfied with the program for the congress, and threaten to withdraw if it is not changed. A proposition to submit the debt-collecting question to the coming Hague conference was made and rejected.

— The National Liquor Dealers’ Association assembled in Louisville, June 5, for its annual convention, and while the members were apparently sober, issued an address to the people of the United States conveying the news that the liquor dealers believed in temperance, that they indorsed the white ribbon and blue ribbon movement, and believed intemperance should be considered a crime. They favored also the abolition of the low-grade saloon, favoring high-toned drinking places to which a man would bring his wife and children. It was a possible oversight that no plan was reported to reform the character of alcohol.

— The annual arbitration or world’s peace conference at Lake Mohonk, N. Y., was opened May 30. In a reference to Russia’s call for another Hague peace conference, the presiding officer, Gen. J. W. Foster, said: “A discouraging feature of it is that in the program of subjects to be considered the limitation of armaments has not been included. It was hardly to be expected that this measure would be suggested by the power whose armies so recently had been driven from the field and its navy annihilated. But it is of equal importance, with the general acceptance of the principle of arbitration, that some measure shall be adopted to put a stop to this ever-increasing competition of the great powers in the enlargement of their standing armies and navies.”

— Bishop McCabe, of the Methodist Church, has made the following statement as a representative Methodist touching the question of the open shop, which recently came up for settlement at the Methodist Book Concern. The bishop’s utterance has aroused considerable discussion and some criticism. He says: “We are opposed to having a small percentage of labor men run the entire laboring class in a high-handed and authoritative manner. We are the friends of labor, but we are as much the friends of the ninety per cent of the laborers who resent the bossism of the ten per cent who are doing the bossing. It is an imposition for a few men to be able to say, ‘Join our union or you can not work.’ It is an imposition to refuse to allow men to work as they will if they work honestly and earn their livelihood by honest sweat.”

— The Chicago meat packers are making every effort to defeat the movement for reform in their methods of business, and their representatives in Washington now boldly deny the truth of the report made by the President’s commissioners, Messrs. Neill and Reynolds. The packers have invited a committee of Congress to come to Chicago and investigate the conditions to which the report relates. Meanwhile there is a tremendous falling off in the meat trade, both domestic and foreign; and simultaneously, no doubt, there is a tremendous house-cleaning in the packing establishments. An amendment to the meat inspection bill has been brought forward in the House which takes most of the force out of its provisions, and the packers have grounds for hope that this substitute measure will be adopted. Their plan, says the Washington Post, “appears to be to delay reporting the Agricultural Bill to the House until a much later day, and then force it through without any meat-inspection amendment or to add the substitute which is satisfactory to the packers.”