Current Mention

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Oct 22, 1903

— Mrs. Dwight L. Moody, widow of the famous evangelist, died October 10, at her home in East Northfield, Mass.

— Dr. Francis Landley Patton, formerly president of the university, was inaugurated president of Princeton Seminary, October 14.

— At a recent meeting in New York City Rev. A. B. Simpson, of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, collected $63,539.50 for foreign missions.

— It is reported that a Hamburg firm has received an order to equip the Chinese emperor’s palace at Peking with electricity. For this purpose a dynamo with four steam engines and sixteen transformers will be required.

— The board of directors of Princeton seminary has decided to establish a course in English Bible to meet a need that has been apparent for some time. The new chair in English Bible studies will be established next fall.

— On October 20, President Roosevelt issued a call for a special session of Congress to convene November 9. The particular business of the special session will be the ratification of the treaty of reciprocity with Cuba.

— The report that Mgr. Falconio, the papal delegate to the United States, is to be recalled is not credited in Washington. Few, if any, changes in the representatives of the pope abroad are expected by those who are in a position to know.

— L. D. Parr, of Chicago, announces that he has closed a deal for 32,000 acres of land in the southwestern part of North Dakota for the Dowieites of Chicago, who purpose colonizing the land and establishing a Zion in Bowman and Billings Counties.

— A three-days’ storm, said to be the most severe since official records have been kept, began raging along the Atlantic coast on Thursday, October 8. Heavy rainfall has done great damage by flooding the lower portions of many cities. Bridges were swept away, and business and travel greatly impeded. The rainfall in New York City was six inches during the first twenty-four hours. Millions of dollars of damage to property, thousands of families temporarily homeless, and not a few deaths, is the record of this raging of the elements.

— The fall of the level of the water in Salt Lake, Utah, has exposed, where the water was shallow, numerous islands which prove to be asphalt of a splendid quality.

— A group of large spots, with a diameter apparently equal to one tenth of the sun’s, has been observed for ten days past. These are described as the most prominent that have been seen in years, and may be seen by the eye aided only by a piece of smoked or colored glass.

— The American Federation of Labor will endeavor during the next session of Congress to secure the passage of a bill making eight hours the legal limit of a day’s work in the United States, and also a bill prohibiting the Federal courts from issuing injunction in cases of disputes over labor matters.

— A concerted movement has been started to bring about a uniform wage scale for the 50,000 locomotive firemen employed in the United States. An increase in wages ranging from ten to twenty per cent will be demanded. The want of uniform conditions on the railways which employ the firemen seems to have no bearing on the question in their minds.

— John Alexander Dowie, who has within a few years attracted so much attention in religious circles because of his peculiar method of work and his arrogant claims to be the reincarnation of Elijah, has just entered upon a six weeks’ mission in New York City. With 3,000 followers from Chicago, as house-to-house workers, he will conduct three services each day in Madison Square Garden, which has the largest seating capacity in the city.

— Nearly 40,000 car-loads of freight destined for Eastern markets are lying along the lines of the Southern Pacific Company in California waiting to be moved. Unless some immediate method of relieving the congestion is found, the situation will become far more serious, and entail a heavy loss, as much of the freight is of a perishable kind. The blockade is attributed by the officials to unexpected business and a lack of sufficient power to move trains.

— Extensive reductions are being made in the track and shop forces of the principal railroads of the country, “partly for the reason that material decrease in business is anticipated. That is but natural when steel mills are closing down, from the present conditions of the building trades owing to strikes.” Some roads have stopped their improvements, in hope of being able to accomplish the same work more cheaply in the future.

— The virulent and fatal epidemic at Santiago has been diagnosed as pernicious malarial fever. The disease is spreading at Daiquiri among the natives and all classes of residents. Yellow fever is officially reported at Monterey and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and great precautions against the disease are being taken along the Texas border. Two deaths from Bubonic plague were recently reported from the Hawaiian Islands, and cholera, plague, and smallpox continue at Manila.

— At a demonstration of the American Federation of Labor in San Juan, Porto Rico, on the 11th, in which black flags and the American flag draped in black were carried, trouble was precipitated between the paraders and the police. Several were injured, and a riot was barely averted. Seven labor leaders were arrested. While the feeling of the labor party against the administration is bitter, the Americans and better class of Porto Ricans are indignant at the treatment accorded the flag.

— There are in Russia three revolutionary parties at the present time, known as the Russian Socialist Revolutionary party, the Russian Social Democratic party, and the Liberal Revolutionary party. These parties pursue different tactics, and aim at different ideals, but are united in seeking the overthrow of the existing Russian autocracy. They publish several papers, some of which have a large circulation. The government has imprisoned many members of these parties and suppressed their papers at various times, but is not able to stop their propaganda.

— One of the most sweeping injunctions ever issued by an Ohio court has been granted against the Hamilton Typographical Union, the Hamilton Co-operative Trades and Labor Council, and the Nonpareil Printing Company, publishers of the county trade organs. The defendants are enjoined from continuing a boycott on the Republican News, or firms which advertise in it, and ordered that interference of every sort with the company’s business must stop. The court said the Constitution gave any company the right to employ whomsoever it saw fit. The boycott was to force the plaintiff to unionize and abandon its “open shop” policy.

— The facts known in St. Petersburg in regard to the far Eastern situation, say The Times’s Russian correspondents, all point in the direction of warlike preparations and the prevalence of alarm and anxiety. One hundred thousand men are being dispatched to the far East from the districts beyond Moscow, Tambol, and Penza. About a week ago a special train of fourteen trucks full of surgical dressing materials and medicaments for the use of the troops started from St. Petersburg for the far East. The war ministry is said already to have demanded an extra credit for these preparations of 25,000,000 rubles ($12,500,000). M. Witte’s successor in the finance ministry is reported to be hardly able to cope with the difficulties of the situation. Russia is also hurrying to the far East as fast as the naval establishments can train the naval officers for service on the vessels of her mushroom growth Pacific squadron.

— A decision has been handed down by the (New York) court of appeals declaring dependence upon faith healing in case of sickness to be criminal negligence. Judge Haight, of the court of appeals, in reversing the decision of the lower court in the case of the People versus Pierson, says in part: “It would seem that the legislative intent is reasonably clear. The section of the code under which the indictment was found contemplates that there are persons upon whom the law casts the duty of caring for minors. We are aware that there are people who believe that divine power may be invoked to heal the sick, and that faith is all that is required. There are others who believe that the Creator has supplied the earth with everything that man may want, including means for restoring his health. There are still others who believe that Christianity and science go hand in hand; and that both science and divine power may be invoked together to restore diseased and suffering humanity. But sitting as a court of law for the purpose of construing and determining the meaning of statutes, we have nothing to do with variances in religious belief, and have no power to determine which is correct. We merely declare the law as given by the legislature.”

— In a speech on “Good Citizenship” at the annual banquet of the Commercial Club at the Auditorium Hotel, Chicago, October 14, ex-President Grover Cleveland vigorously arraigned certain tendencies of the time. He warned his hearers against being led by a confiding trust in the greatness of the American eagle to believe that that eagle can weather any storm. He declared that official corruption had grown from small beginnings until it had reached “frightful proportions of malevolence.” He reminded his hearers that in other republics the pretense that “national splendor built upon the showy ventures of speculative wealth” is a badge of success has preceded the doom of popular rule. He asserted that the masses had been invited “in the bare subsistence of their scanty homes,” to rejoice in the prosperity to which this dangerous meaning had been given. The result, he said, had been “a dissatisfied insistence upon a better distribution of our vaunted prosperity,” and it had found its worst manifestation in “the apparently incorrigible dislocation of the proper relations between labor and capital.” His remedy for these evils, which he declared to be “with steady, cankering growth, threatening our safety and national life,” was a reawakening of the old American spirit of simplicity, equality, and respect for law, and he urged his hearers to take an active and continuous part in public affairs, to become politicians, and to rescue that word from its “prostitution to a sinister use.”