p. 7 | Note and Comment

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

Note and Comment

EMPEROR WILLIAM visited the pope at the Vatican, May 3, the event being, from a spectacular point of view, one of the most notable witnessed in Rome in many years, says a Rome dispatch. The emperor dined with the three leading cardinals in Rome, with whom, the report says, he was most affable. At the Vatican gates the emperor and his suite were received with military honors by the “palatine guards” and a company of gendarmes, over whom the papal flag was held aloft. The emperor’s interview with the pope lasted forty minutes. As a special mark of deference to the papacy, the emperor did not drive directly to the Vatican from the Quirinal, as he had done on former occasions but first went to the Prussian legation, and while there received a visit from the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Rampolla.

SOME information concerning the state of affairs in the Balkans comes through the Constantinople correspondent of the London Times. A recent dispatch sent from Monastir states that the situation in that villayet is most deplorable. Well-authenticated reports state that murder, pillage, incendiarism, acts of vengeance, and atrocities of every kind are of daily occurrence, and are committed alike by soldiers, Albanians, Turks, and Bulgarians. The latest Bulgarian achievement was the total destruction of a small village of exclusively Mussulman population of 165 men, women, and children. All of these, except a very few, were massacred in cold blood.