News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 14, 1912

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— Wisconsin is to spend $1,250,000 on highway improvements during the year 1912.

— The report of the National Child Labor Committee, just issued, shows that better child labor laws were passed in thirty States this year.

— Great complaints of lack of freight-cars come from the farmers of western Canada. It is said that, unless relief is found, 70,000,000 bushels of wheat will perish in the fields.

— Great Britain and Russia are about to revise their joint agreement concerning Persia, adopted in 1907, in order to bring harmony out of the existing conditions in that country.

— New Zealand has recently held a referendum on the total prohibition of liquor within four years. The measure was lost by a small majority; but the votes show a substantial gain in favor of temperance in the island.

— Because of his action in writing a letter advising the State Department that the proposed visit of Secretary Knox to the republic of Colombia would be “inopportune,” Gen. Pedro Nel Ospina, Colombian minister to the United States, was recalled February 24 by his own government.

— The wireless telegraphy station at Nauen, near Berlin, now possesses a tower which is said to be the highest in the world, with the exception of the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, and the Singer and Metropolitan towers, in New York. The tower was originally 300 feet high, but to increase the range of the wireless station, which is already able to communicate direct with New York, it was decided to add another 300 feet. This engineering feat has been accomplished, and in overcast weather the summit is often lost in the clouds.

— The British and Foreign Bible Society has published the second and final volume of its great “Historic Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the Society.” The first volume, issued in 1903, contained 428 pages; the second volume has 1,750. The catalogue describes nearly 10,000 separate editions, arranged under 628 different language-headings. It shows that some part, at least, of the Bible has now been published with a religious or missionary aim in 550 distinct forms of human speech.

— Diplomatic relations between the Argentine Republic and Paraguay have been broken off, and the Argentine minister at Asuncion has retired from his post. The trouble arose through Paraguayan revolutionists firing on Argentine vessels lying in Asuncion harbor.

— Missionary reports from Jerusalem speak of fresh modern improvements. A city government, pledged to carry through new water-works and a sewage system, has been elected, and property suited for building purposes is rising considerably in value. Land that sold for a penny a square foot some years ago now brings three shillings. A harbor is being talked of at Jaffa, and American reaping-machines can be seen at work. A Jewish university at Jerusalem is now under discussion.

— Senator Henry G. Davis, in discussing the prospects of a railroad to Central and thence to South America recently said: “It is within the range of possibilities that a railroad will reach the Panama Canal by the time it is completed, thus making possible a journey by land from any point in the United States to the banks of the great waterway. Only 170 miles of the line are necessary to connect with the railroad building southward from the city of Mexico and to complete an uninterrupted track to the canal. The Mexican government is pushing the work of railroad construction, and no doubt the Central American states which have disconnected links of roads, will do their part.”

— Fifty or sixty years ago geographers spoke of the Great American Desert. It was a vast semiarid belt, stretched across a great part of the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. So it remained until a comparatively recent date. June 17, 1902, the Reclamation act was passed, and through the work of the Reclamation Service a part of that formerly barren region now annually produces crops valued at $250,000,000. Much of that land sells for hundreds of dollars an acre. The sum of $70,000,000 has already been expended, or rather invested, in the work. During the next four years $48,000,000 will be spent. Irrigation has done the work. Thirteen million acres of the old-time “American Sahara,” that formerly were merely sage-brush and alkali waste, now yield abundant crops of grains, fruits, grass, etc.

— The present is surely a period of world unrest. Italy and Turkey are still seeking to wear out each other by inconclusive skirmishes on the sands of Tripoli. Russia has taken Mongolia, and has thus added a million square miles of territory to her empire without any “by your leave” to the Mongolians. France is finding out how difficult her task in Morocco is going to be. Germany faces the crisis involved in a socialist victory at the polls, which, if representation was fairly distributed, would make the socialists rulers of the German parliament. Germany and England still look upon each other as necessary antagonists in the great war for which each is making colossal preparations, while all the time protesting that peace is their one dream and their sole desire. Revolution is almost epidemic in some of the Latin-American republics, and Madero’s Mexico is still far from Mexico the peaceful-