Current Mention

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · Apr 8, 1902

— The bubonic plague is raging in the Punjab, in India. About 70,000 deaths are reported monthly.

— Twelve hotels were destroyed by a conflagration at Atlantic City, N. J., April 3. Loss, $1,000,000.

— Four thousand houses in the silk-manufacturing town of Fukui, Japan, were recently destroyed by fire, this news coming from Yokohama, March 31.

— Governor La Follette, of Wisconsin, was called on recently by the sheriff of Sawyer County for troops to settle an election riot at Hayward, in that State.

— Cholera is reported to be on the increase at Manila. The natives and Chinese constitute the victims of the epidemic thus far. Detention camps will be established.

— A serious condition of affairs prevails in Macedonia, according to recent reports, and the Turkish government is said to be making preparations to mobilize the auxiliary Turkish troops, in anticipation of an attempted Macedonian revolt.

— The American consul general at San Salvador reports that on February 16 the whole coast of Salvador was inundated by a tidal wave ten feet high, two other smaller waves following it. A village containing about 200 inhabitants was destroyed, and many of the residents were drowned.

— Pope Leo, it is said, probably figures as legatee in more wills than any other person in the world. According to the New York Tribune, he was named in more than 700 wills last year, the legacies aggregating about $600,000. In this fact is reflected the strong devotion of Catholics to their church.

— Hebrews in Newport News, Va., protested recently against allowing the repetition of the Lord’s prayer in the public-school exercises, and demanded that their children be not compelled to listen to the prayer. The school authorities were at first inclined to agree with them, but so much opposition was developed against the idea of abandoning the practice, that the authorities have ordered it to be continued as usual.

— Two boys, aged sixteen and twenty, residents of Trenton, Mo., recently sought to wreck a passenger train on the Rock Island Railway, out of revenge for having been put off a freight train. They had recently been perusing dime novels.

— A cholera epidemic prevails at Mecca, the shrine of Mohammedan pilgrims. The deaths number hundreds daily, and the pilgrims are fleeing to Jedda, sixty miles distant. Many of them are indigent, and great distress prevails.

— Twenty-two lives were lost at Dayton, Tenn., March 31, by a premature explosion in a shaft of the Nelson mine. The explosion wrecked the woodwork at the mouth of the mine, and several of those killed were standing near the entrance on the outside.

— A report from St. Thomas, in the Danish West Indies, says the expectation is current there, from dispatches received from Washington, that the United States will allow the Danish West Indies a separate government, at least provisionally, and that the prospect is very gratifying to the inhabitants, who have long been allowed self-government to a considerable extent.

— A dispatch from Lexington, Neb., states that a raid like those inaugurated by Carrie Nation was conducted by twelve women at Eddyville, April 1. All the women wore heavy veils. They smashed a liquor “joint,” destroying the furniture and several cases of whisky. The proprietor was given twenty-four hours’ time in which to leave the town, a coat of tar and feathers being promised him in case of refusal.

— Official notice has been served by the United States upon European governments that if American goods are excluded from European markets, the United States possesses the power to retaliate very effectively upon the country so offending, by excluding its products from American markets. A list of goods which are liable to exclusion under the existing tariff act and other laws in force, accompanies this warning.

— Statements derogatory to the character of the papacy are not often heard in governing assemblies in papal countries, but Belgium has recently furnished an exception to the rule in this respect. The Brussels correspondent of the London Times says that on March 22 a socialist leader in the chamber of representatives moved the suppression of the Belgian minister to the Vatican, and declared that the crimes of certain popes in the Middle Ages discredited the papacy in the eyes of Christendom. His motion was voted down.

— The Shanghai correspondent of the London Times says, in a recent letter on conditions in China, that the most important impression fixed in the Chinese mind as a result of the campaign of 1900, is a new conception of Christianity and its results, drawn from the doings of the “Christian” nations. The correspondent alleges that the deportment of these troops compared very unfavorably with that of the heathen Japanese, and he adds that it can only reasonably be expected that the cause of Christianity will suffer further in the near-future.

— According to statements made by those who assume to know, the United States is considerably behind leading European nations in the equipment of its ships of war with wireless telegraphy outfits. Experiments are now being conducted by the government, however, to determine which of the several systems that have been brought into use is best adapted for the purposes of naval warfare.

— The State department has received reports which assert that a Russian monument erected in Alaska to mark the boundary line between Russian and British territory when Alaska was a “Russian possession,” has been removed by an official surveying expedition of the Canadian government. The secretary of state has directed an investigation to be made, and has appointed a commission for that purpose.

— Professor Ranke, a leading scientist of Bavaria, Germany, in a recent lecture spoke of his belief in the commonly accepted theory of the descent of man from the ape, among his hearers being Prince George of Bavaria. Immediately afterward the prince walked up to the professor and told him that the royal family of Bavaria—no matter what might be true of the common people—could not possibly have descended from an ape, and that such talk on the professor’s part would have to stop. The professor was too much surprised to make a reply.

— Great floods in Tennessee along the line of the Cumberland River have been reported the past week, the rise in the river being almost unprecedented. Over twenty persons are known to have been drowned, and property has been destroyed to the extent of millions of dollars. In Giles County, Tennessee, only five iron bridges remain out of thirty-five that were standing before the flood. Floods have also prevailed in some sections of North Dakota. At Jamestown a lake thirty miles long and two miles wide has been formed, which bids fair to be permanent; at Grand Forks high water interrupted the service on the Great Northern Railway. The floods along the southern Mississippi are receding, and the worst is thought to be over. The damage to property along the great river will be enormous. Many negroes are believed to have been drowned.

— A train load of passengers on the Northern Pacific Railway was snow bound on a North Dakota prairie for four days, ending April 1, near Williston, and passed through an experience attended with much suffering from cold and hunger. The engine drawing the train was disconnected, and attempted to push through the drifts to Williston, but became stuck, and had to be abandoned. There was no heat in the coaches and the food supply was short. A fierce blizzard was raging, which prohibited any attempt to go on foot for relief. One man, a professor in a Western university, became insane, and tried to kill himself. Finally an electrician and telegraph operator who was on the train improvised an apparatus by means of which, after climbing a telegraph pole and tapping the wires, he managed to send word of the situation to a neighboring town, and a rescue was effected by engines sent out with snowplows. The coaches were buried to the roofs in snowdrifts, and this helped to keep the passengers from freezing.

— A boy under twenty-one years is not ‘of age,’ and is supposed to be legally under the guardianship and in the custody of his parents; but as between parents and the government, the latter is declared by the courts to have claims paramount to the parents over minors who have enlisted in the military service. So says a press dispatch stated at New Orleans, which reads: ‘A decision affecting every parent in the land has been handed down by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. It returns a sixteen-year-old boy, Dan Miller, of Austin, Tex., to the custody of the military authorities to stand trial by court-martial for desertion, declaring the military law paramount, and reversing the opinion of the district judge, who had granted the habeas corpus applied for by the parents on the ground that the lad was a minor. The decision holds that the parents of the prisoner lost, by reason of the enlistment of their son, their right to his custody.’