p. 21 | Current Mention

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Oct 8, 1903

Current Mention

—Both cholera and the plague are reported to be raging at Pei-thang, China, a seaport fifty miles east of Tientsin.

—Temperance reform seems to be making good headway in Indiana, 800 saloons having been closed the past year, and liquor having been banished from 250 townships.

—A hurricane swept over Bermuda, September 28, blowing down and unroofing many buildings, and doing great damage to growing crops. No loss of life has been reported.

—It is reported from Shanghai, China, that another Chinese rebellion is under way in Kwang-tung Province, fomented by secret societies in the absence of the viceroy. Considerable alarm is felt in Canton.

—Nine persons were killed in a railway accident near Danville, Va., September 22, caused by a train leaving the track on a curving trestle, and plunging into a gully filled with rocks. The train was rounding the curve at too great a speed.

—Russia has now, it is said, 250,000 soldiers in the far East, 50,000 of whom are in Manchuria. Thirty Russian forts have been erected at Port Arthur, and fifty more are being built. Eighty war-ships are at Talienwan, forty of which are kept constantly under steam.

—The failure of the Consolidated Lake Superior Company at Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., was followed by serious rioting September 28, during which the mob broke windows, destroyed furniture in the office building of the company, and several persons were seriously injured. The arrival of militia put an end to the disturbance. The employees of the company were enraged because they were not paid the wages that were due them.

—It is announced that France will soon undertake the conquest of Morocco, which will after its conquest become a part of the French empire. An agreement has been reached between France and other interested European powers which gives France a free hand in the matter, and it is not expected that the sultan of Morocco will be able to offer a great resistance. England, in return for her neutrality in the contest, is said to have secured from France a full recognition of her claims in Newfoundland, and an acquiescence in the British occupation of Egypt.

—It is stated that 75,000 children now attend school in Porto Rico, as compared with 22,000 in 1897.

—Large deposits of tin are reported to have been discovered at Cape York, on the coast of Behring Sea.

—The eleventh annual convention of the National Spiritualists' Association of the United States and Canada will be held in Washington, October 20-23 next. One hundred delegates or more from the United States and Canada are expected to be present. There are at present 19 State Spiritualist associations, more than 800 local associations, and 52 camp-meeting associations. The whole number of adherents in the United States and Canada is believed to exceed 1,500,000.

—Press dispatches are giving numerous reports of the work of “firebugs” in various places. In a single night in Harlem, a district of New York City, five fires believed to have been of incendiary origin were discovered, each one of them in the cellar of a tenement building. Residents of Oberlin, Ohio, are reported to be “greatly excited over a plague of incendiary fires that has struck the place.” A score of fires believed to have been incendiary have occurred there the past summer.

—Press dispatches from New York tell of fresh trouble in the building trade, due to the victory of Parks in the labor-union convention at Kansas City. The recent prosecution of Parks for extorting money from builders in New York City marked the termination of a long and bitter contest between the unions and employers there, and his indorsement by the Kansas City labor convention appears to have given him a new lease of power to be used to exact further concessions from builders. Unions and employers say the coming struggle will be decisive, and so forth. Thus the endless contest goes on. Each struggle is expected to be decisive, and peace is looked for at its conclusion; but hardly is one contest over, when a new and greater one is begun. Selfishness rules the whole situation, and it is vain to look for peace where there are only the elements of strife.

—A Pan-American railway extending from Hudson's Bay to Buenos Ayres, a distance of 10,000 miles, is a project which has been started by a company incorporated at Guthrie, O. T., where papers have been filed with the secretary of the Territory. The purpose of the corporation, it is said, is to build a line of railway extending from Port Nelson, Hudson Bay, in a southerly direction, crossing the line of the Canadian Pacific near Winnipeg, Manitoba, through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Indian Territory, to Galveston, Tex.; from Galveston through Mexico to the boundary line of Central America; through the Isthmus of Panama, thence through the United States of Colombia to Ecuador, and finally through Peru to Buenos Ayres on the Atlantic Ocean; also a branch line beginning in Peru and extending in a southeasterly direction through Brazil to Rio de Janeiro, and a branch line beginning in Peru and extending in a southerly direction through Chile, to Valparaiso, on the South Pacific Ocean. The estimated cost of the Pan-American railway is $250,000,000.