Current Mention

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 12, 1903

—Paul Du Chaillu, the famous explorer and author, died at St. Petersburg, Russia, April 29.

—Nine men were killed and twenty-one injured by the explosion of a powder mill at Ganister, Pa., April 30.

—A dispatch from Dallas, Tex., states that Texas crops have been damaged by frost to the extent of $10,000,000.

—The Ottoman Bank at Salonika, Turkey, was blown up with dynamite, April 30. Fighting and rioting continue to be reported from Macedonia.

—The Santa Maria volcano in Guatemala is again active, according to recent reports from that country. The amount of damage done is not stated.

—At the rate at which the tide of immigration is now pouring into this country, the population of the United States will be increased by about 1,000,000 during the present year.

—An attempt to secure exemption of church property in New York City from assessments for improvements, was vetoed by Mayor Low, who pointed out that such a step would reverse the uniform practice of the city and the State for a century.

—A dispatch from Simla, India, to the Exchange Telegraph Company, London, says it is officially announced that the bubonic plague in India infects 9 British provinces, 156 districts, 109 big towns, 7 cantonments, and 51 states. The weekly mortality exceeds 30,000.

—The formal dedication of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition took place at St. Louis, April 30, with imposing ceremonies, President Roosevelt, ex-President Cleveland, and a number of State governors being present. The opening of the fair will not take place until next year.

—Recent temperance legislation at Albany having raised the price of a liquor-tax certificate fifty per cent, the number of saloons in Greater New York has been reduced by about 700, but the total receipts of the saloons show a steady increase. Decreasing the number of the saloons has no necessary connection with a decrease in the amount of drinking.

—The question of the desirability of the separation of church and state is being brought to the attention of the people of France. An elaborate scheme providing for such separation has been prepared, says the Paris Temps, and has the signatures of over fifty Radicals and Socialist supporters of the government. There seems to be ground for the hope that the separation will be realized at no distant day.

—A Chicago stock yards strike which occurred not long ago was settled by the appointment of three clergymen as arbitrators. Recently the clerical arbitrators presented their bill for services, asking $1,000 each. Both the packers and their workmen objected to the bill as being exorbitant, and it was decided at a meeting of their representatives that the arbitrators should be paid at the rate of thirty cents an hour, at which rate the bill amounted to $14.50 each.

—Cholera is again raging in the Philippines, and threatens to spread over the island of Luzon. Since January, there have been in Manila 101 cases of bubonic plague, confined mostly to the natives and the Chinese.

—A Roman Catholic missionary in China, Shan-tung province, reports that a new Chinese sect, similar to the Boxers, has become very formidable in his vicinity, and that a wholesale massacre of foreigners by the fanatics is in prospect.

—A dispatch from Salonica, dated May 4, says that an engagement between Turkish troops and a band of revolutionists is reported to have taken place in the Monastir district of European Turkey. Both sides suffered considerable loss. Ten Turkish officers are said to have been killed.

—More than a score of passengers and members of the crew on the Clyde line steamer “Saginaw” were drowned as the result of a collision between that ship and the steamer “Hamilton” of the Dominion line, which took place off the Virginia coast in a dense fog, on the morning of May 5, about two hundred miles from Norfolk, Va.

—Members of the Chicago Turn Bezirk who obey the laws of the order must not become members of any State militia, pursuant to a recommendation unanimously adopted at the forty-sixth convention recently held in Grand Rapids, Mich. In the State of Illinois there are several thousand members of the order.

—Wm. Pickens, of Little Rock, Ark., the colored orator of Yale, 1904, has received an invitation to become the head of an Afro-American empire to be established in the island of Hayti. The proposition comes from N. L. Musgrove, of Sturgis, Ky., who is agitating a movement tending toward the seizure of the island of Hayti by American negroes.

—The Protestant Alliance of England did not look with favor on King Edward’s recent visit to the pope, and in a telegram to the king’s secretary at Rome declared its “intense regret that our Protestant king intends to visit the pope, who is described in the homilies of our established church as antichrist;” and expressed its earnest “hope that the rumors are absolutely unfounded.”

—President Loubet, of France, will visit Rome soon. The pope, after consulting his cardinals, has decided not to receive the French president, and this decision will be semi-officially communicated to France. The pope’s refusal to receive the president of France certainly will lead to a diplomatic rupture between the Vatican and the French government and the abolition of the concordat.

—The week ending May 4 was unseasonably cool over the greater part of the country, the minimum temperatures of April 30 and May 1 and 2 being the lowest recorded in the last decade of April and the first days of May for the last thirty years at nearly all the weather bureau stations from the central and west gulf coasts to the upper Missouri Valley, and also at a number of stations in the central Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, the lake region, and New England. Nearly all fruits have suffered further damage from frosts and low temperatures, apples apparently having escaped with the least injury.

—Great Britain has officially warned the powers of Europe that any attempt on their part, or on the part of any one of them, to establish a naval base or fortified port on the shores of the Persian Gulf will be resisted to the utmost strength of the army and navy. The warning was given officially by the marquis of Lansdowne, secretary of state for foreign affairs, in a formal statement to the House of Lords. Lord Lansdowne’s attitude in this matter generally meets with approval, although the answers thereto of the other powers interested in the gulf are awaited with some anxiety.

—The English House of Commons by formal resolution has guaranteed the new Transvaal loan of $175,000,000. In explaining the necessity for the loan Colonial Secretary Chamberlain stated that it had been decided to purchase all the existing railways, which would absorb $65,000,000 of the new loan, and $25,000,000 more would be expended as quickly as possible on the development of railways, $12,500,000 would be spent on land settlement, and $10,000,000 on public works. In addition to this loan an additional loan of $150,000,000 will be made by the Transvaal and Orange River colonies, in three installments of $50,000,000 each. This loan will be the colonies’ contribution to the expense of the war, and will not be guaranteed by the British government.