p. 18 | News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 2, 1916

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

—Major R. R. Moton, of Hampton Institute, has been elected to succeed Dr. Booker T. Washington as head of Tuskegee Institute. He is a full-blooded Negro. His ability as an educator, an orator, and an executive fits him for the responsible labors of his new position.

—Chicago is to have a Booker T. Washington memorial in the form of a social center and industrial training school for Negro children.

—Samuel Selwyn Chamberlain, publisher of the Boston American, and one of the foremost newspaper men of the world, died in San Francisco on January 25, of heart failure. He was born in Walworth, N. Y., Sept. 25, 1851.

—Minneapolis, Minn., reports a record sale of flour for the past three months—a total of 6,400,000 barrels shipped, more than a million barrels more than at any other similar period. Figured out, this means a production of over two barrels every second of a working day.

—St. Louis has for the time being taken the place of London as the fur market of the world. At the recent auction sale there the United States government sold $60,000 worth of fox skins from the Pribilof Islands, Alaska. Hitherto the government has sent its furs to the London market.

—The wax figures of the Eden Musée, which for a generation have delighted or horrified young New Yorkers, were recently sold at auction, the old-fashioned amusement place having succumbed to the photo play and the uptown movement. Most of the figures brought about $10 each; a group, however, of “rulers of the world” brought $600.

—The latest and certainly the strangest dictionary of any branch of the human race is that of the American Gypsy, just compiled by George F. Black, Ph. D., for the New York public library, the first institution in the United States to possess such a vocabulary. The work will be of inestimable assistance to students of Gypsy lore and languages.

—There is not a Waldensian above six years of age that is illiterate. The little Church of the Valleys, with but 13,000 members and 16 pastors, has over 270 organized churches, and mission stations in Italy, Sicily, and Egypt. Twelve Waldensian missionaries preach the gospel in South Africa. In Uruguay and Argentina there are seven churches among Waldensian colonists.

—Great Britain recently announced its willingness to permit exportation from Germany of sufficient dyestuffs to supply the immediate needs of American industries. Negotiations with Germany, based upon this assurance, have been begun by the State Department with a view of persuading the imperial government to permit the exportation of dyestuffs without receiving concessions, which it heretofore has demanded, of foodstuffs or cotton from the United States.

—The first military correspondence school to be established in this country is now in operation with a body of nearly 1,500 students, among them many widely known and successful citizens. The headquarters of this big school is on Governor's Island, N. Y., and the two men who are directing it are Maj.-Gen. Leonard Wood, the commanding general of the Eastern Department of the army, and Capt. Halstead Dorey, who was the commanding officer of the Business and Professional Men's Training Camp at Plattsburg last summer. More than 5,000 men are eligible for the course, and there is every reason to believe that next year the enrolment will reach at least 3,000.

—Twenty-five persons were drowned and a wide stretch of country devastated near San Diego, Cal., when a dam in the Otay Valley, south of the city, broke under the strain of flood waters caused by heavy storms. Those who lost their lives were Japanese men, women, and children. It is stated that an area fifteen miles wide and two miles long was under water.

—The directors of the Eastman Kodak Company have declared a wage dividend of nearly $1,000,000, payable to all employees who have worked for them a year or more. Payment is to be made on the basis of three and one-half per cent of a year's salary, multiplied by the number of years, not exceeding five, the employee has been with the company. The distribution will be made July 1, 1916.

—C. L. Freer, of Detroit, Mich., has given $1,000,000 to the Smithsonian Institution to house the collection of paintings, engravings, bronzes, porcelains, etc., which he has given to the institution from time to time, and which embraces treasures of art from all parts of the world, some of them dating from a period antedating the Christian era. Work on the new building will begin next spring.

—The American International Corporation, the new foreign trade organization formed with $50,000,000 of capital to strengthen the position of the United States in world trade, is going into the shipping business. Charles A. Stone, president of the company, has announced the purchase of ships still remaining under the flag of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which is undergoing liquidation.

—Among the many kinds of schools and opportunities for general and special training the latest is the announcement of a school for grocers. Among the subjects to be embraced in the curriculum, and for which experts will be employed and demonstrations given, are salesmanship, bookkeeping, window trimming, card writing, store and show cases, how and when to buy, bargains, competition, fixtures, store arrangements.

—Thomas A. Edison, chairman of the Naval Consulting Board, described at a recent meeting of the board his plan for a physical laboratory for making naval experiments. It calls for the purchase of 100 acres of land at tidewater, and a plant to cost about $1,400,000. It is believed the Naval Consulting Board will recommend in a report to the Secretary of the Navy the acquisition of this land on New York tidewater, within easy distance of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, so that experiments in naval architecture and machinery can be made on water as well as on land.

—Reports on the dyestuff situation in the United States, recently laid before the National Association of Clothing Manufacturers at a special meeting in New York City, indicated that a crisis for the garment trade is near at hand. Representatives of more than $75,000,000 of capital invested in the manufacture of men's garments heard the reports that attempts to relieve the situation by importations of logwood dye had been a failure, as all the logwood dye in Jamaica, if available, would be inadequate. It was declared that more than 1,000 textile mills, employing upward of 100,000 persons, are now either idle or running on part time because of the shortage of dyes.

—There are 13,000,000 persons under twenty-one years of age engaged in gainful occupations in the United States. Attention to this fact was drawn by Ernst Hermann, director of physical education in Somerville, Mass., at a recent meeting of the State Child Labor Committee held in Fall River. Sedentary and semiphysical work, especially if this work is uninteresting, means for children stunted growth of body, mind, and soul, added Mr. Hermann. He pleaded for opportunity for recreation and all-round physical activities for the adolescent worker.

—The United States has gradually acquired more than one fourth of the world's supply of gold money. If Europe finally has to sell to America the $5,000,000,000 worth of American securities which she still holds, the United States will have gone a long way toward establishing a dollar exchange. These facts were outlined recently by Robert W. Woolley, director of the mint. On December 1, including coin in circulation and bullion and coin in the Treasury, there was $2,260,687,547 in the country, an increase of $370,009,243 over July 1, 1914, before the war began.

—Nearly all geographies and reference books still give London as the most populous city on the globe, but for some time New York has occupied that place, and a new police census of that city which has just been taken confirms this. By this census the population of Greater New York is 5,257,885. This is a gain of about 245,000 over the figures shown by the last State census, and of about 490,000 over the last federal census of 1910. The Statesman's Year Book, a British publication, gives the population of parliamentary London in 1911 as 4,521,685. The World Almanac, an American authority, gives it as 4,542,618.

—Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragist leader, after having been detained by New York immigration authorities for several days at Ellis Island, has been ordered admitted to the United States unconditionally. In overruling the action of a special board of inquiry at New York excluding Mrs. Pankhurst, the Department of Labor held that any offenses of which Mrs. Pankhurst might have been convicted in England were political. The law excludes only persons convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude. Mrs. Pankhurst, here in the interest of Serbian relief, may remain in the United States as long as she wishes.

—Another remarkable triumph of science has been or is about to be achieved in linking the United States and its foreign possessions by a great chain of wireless stations. Secretary Daniels, of the Navy Department, made arrangements recently for the equipment of radio stations now under construction at San Diego, Cal.; Cavite, P. I.; and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. When this work is completed sometime next year, Washington will be in instant wireless touch with all the American islands. Plans are also being prepared to increase the power of the existing equipment at Tutuila and Guam, making them a part of the great world chain. The new stations at Pearl Harbor and Cavite will be the most powerful in the world, equipped with apparatus capable of sending messages over an area of approximately 4,700 miles.

—For the first time in the history of the country, the National Prohibition party has a representative in Congress, Charles H. Randall, of Los Angeles, Cal., having taken his seat in the lower house with the opening of the present session. Congressman Randall lost no time in getting into action, introducing three bills on the liquor question within a very few hours of the opening of Congress. The first is a measure to abolish interstate traffic in alcoholic liquors. It is worded so as to leave no loopholes nor any possibilities whereby the law may be legally evaded. The second is intended to protect the parcel post system by applying to the shipping of liquor through the post office the same drastic law that prevents the mailing of lottery tickets. The third would bar all liquor sellers from all United States government property and territory.

—A “memorial to a movement” is Gutzon Borglum’s own name for the biggest sculptural undertaking in the history of the world. It requires a granite mountain, across the face of which Mr. Borglum will carve a frieze 2,000 feet long and 50 feet wide and five stories high. The work will consume most of the sculptor’s thought and energies during the next eight years. Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Ga., is to be transformed by him into the “Great Confederate Memorial,” at a cost of $2,000,000—a memorial to the South of ’64, built by the South of today. The great characters of those days are to be reconstructed out of the side of this mountain. They will be carved in high and full relief, in action, mounted and on foot. Following the mountain’s contour, they will be moving across the face of it naturally toward the east in the arrangement of two wings of an army. Because they will be in scale with the mountain, which is 700 feet high (the Singer Building is 612 feet), the figures will be colossal, reaching, including the horses, 35 to 50 feet in height, or about five times the size of the Lion of Lucerne.

—The Canadian Parliament building at Ottawa, which cost more than $6,000,000, was destroyed by fire on the night of February 3. The fire is supposed to have been caused by the explosion of a bomb. Wm. S. Loggie, member of Parliament from New Brunswick, is reported missing. Several persons who were burned or otherwise hurt in fleeing through the corridors before the swift rush of the flames or in escaping from the windows, are in the hospitals. The loss to the building is estimated at about $5,000,000, with no insurance, while the contents were such as to make any financial estimate inadequate. The Parliament building was rated as one of the finest Gothic structures on this continent. It covered four acres on Parliament Hill. The building included a central building, with two wings, in all 470 feet in length, with a tower 220 feet high, and a library building in the rear. Many valuable sculptures, paintings, and decorations adorned its rooms and corridors. It was erected in 1865, of cream-colored sandstone, on a bluff rising 150 feet above the Ottawa River. A large part of the immense library was saved. A rigid investigation to determine the cause of the fire has already been undertaken by the Dominion authorities.

—President Wilson recently concluded a trip through the Middle West in the interests of preparedness. He spoke in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Des Moines, Topeka, Kansas City, and St. Louis, being received everywhere by enthusiastic audiences. He urged that party lines be wiped away, and that plans for the adequate defense of the nation be made without more delay. He said: “We live in a world we did not make, which we cannot alter. While America is a great nation, while America contains all the elements of fine force and accomplishment, America is not the major portion of the world. If we are drawn into the maelstrom that swirls even the western regions of the world, we shall not be permitted to do the high things we intend to do. We ought to have in this country a great system of industrial and vocational education under federal guidance and with federal aid, in which a very large percentage of the youth of this country will be given training in the skilful use and application of the principles of science in maneuver and business. And it will be perfectly feasible and highly desirable to add to that and combine with it such a training in the mechanism, use, and care of arms, in the sanitation of camp, in the simpler forms of maneuver and organization, as will make these men industrially efficient and individually serviceable for national defense. All the time things are getting more and more difficult to handle. As your responsible servant, I must tell you that the dangers are grave and constant.”