Current Mention

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 13, 1906

— A ukase recently issued by the czar of Russia permits the peasants to abandon their shares in the communal ownership of village land and become individual freeholders.

— The report of Secretary of the Treasury Shaw shows for the past year a surplus of $25,669,322.61 in the government receipts above the expenditures. There was a deficit of more than $20,000,000 the previous year.

— November 29 the town of Annen, Germany, was reduced to ruins by the explosion of a near-by factory manufacturing roburite, an explosive nearly equal to dynamite. Not a house escaped injury, and many lives were lost.

— Twelve prisoners are dead in Manila as the result of experimenting with cholera virus by the authorities. Inoculation with this virus is quite common there as well as in Spain and other countries. The press of Manila is demanding an investigation to determine the responsibility for these deaths.

— The famine is so terrible in the provinces of Kazan, Russia, that some of the peasants are openly selling their daughters to avert death from starvation. Relief officials just returned from the famine-stricken provinces report that the situation is even worse than described by the earlier accounts. Sickness follows in the track of famine. An epidemic of scurvy has broken out in the Saratov Province.

— Since August 28, when the railroad-rate law passed at the last session of Congress went into effect, there have been filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission 133,002 schedules. More than eighty per cent of these were reductions of previous charges. It might well be thought that a still greater reduction could be afforded when it is known that the net earnings of the railroads of the United States for the year ending June 30, 1906, amounted to $920,221,859, or $250,000,000 more than the government receipts for the same time; while the taxes paid amounted to but six tenths of one per cent of the value of the railroads.

— The President's message read at the opening of Congress on December 3 was one of the longest messages Congress has received, and deals with a multitude of very important matters. His declaration in reference to the school controversy in California has caused much adverse comment, especially among those from the Pacific Coast, who interpreted his words to mean that he would use military force to compel the Californians to admit the Japanese to the public schools attended by whites. The President's own explanation of the expressions in question is that he will protect the lives, property, and peace of the Japanese with force if necessary, while the matter of their attendance at the public schools will be left to the federal courts to determine. There has been considerable talk of the probability of war between the two countries over the matter; but Japanese officials profess to be satisfied with the good intentions of the American government.

— Wireless telegraph messages were exchanged December 4 between the government stations at Loma Linda, Cal., and Puget Sound, a distance of 1,200 miles.

— The practise of sending money in the registered mail in Russia will be abandoned because of the almost daily robbery of mail trains by bands of armed revolutionists whose booty from this course of procedure has reached such large proportions that the government has to repay the senders in instalments.

— A cable dispatch from The Hague announces the termination of a war which has lasted 243 years. The Dutch have been these centuries waging unceasing war against the savage Macassars of the island of Celebes in the East Indies. The last thousand made their final stand in the crater of an extinct volcano.

— During the trial of the president of the Chicago teamsters' union, a witness who has turned States evidence says that during the strike of 1905 the hired pickets were told to break the arms and legs of the strike-breakers. When this failed, they were ordered to throw eggshells filled with acids at the horses driven by non-union men. These missiles were furnished at the headquarters for the pickets, and their use was responsible for many runaways.

— Disasters to vessels have been unusually numerous of late. Confusion of signals caused a night collision on Puget Sound November 18, between the Sound steamer “Dix” and the Alaskan steamer “Jeanie.” The “Dix” sank immediately, and fifty of her passengers and crew were drowned. In a similar manner the ocean liners “Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse” and the “Orinoco” collided in the British Channel the night of November 21; but as neither vessel sank, the loss of life was less; nevertheless thirteen were either crushed to death or drowned, and as many more injured. On the same day a storm was raging on the Great Lakes; and three vessels are known to have been lost, and with them forty-three persons.

— A fast train on the Baltimore and Ohio ran into an open switch fifteen miles from Pittsburg, December 1, killing four persons and fatally wounding another. On the same day a gravel train crashed into a passenger on a down grade in Vermont, killing three women and seriously injuring twelve others. On Thanksgiving day a rear-end collision of two passenger-trains on the Southern Railroad caused the death of seven persons, Samuel Spencer, president of the road, and three of his friends, just starting for a week's outing, being among the number. Possibly his death may awaken the country to the reckless methods of railroad operation in the United States. It is said that the persons killed and crippled by railroad accidents in this country and England respectively are in the ratio of 2,000 to 20. It is gratifying to learn that Attorney-General Moody has directed that suits be brought against a large number of railroad companies to recover penalties for violation of the safety-appliance law through failure to keep their equipment in proper condition. These cases were reported to him by the Interstate Commerce Commission.