ITEMS OF INTEREST by A. J. B.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 12, 1901

ITEMS OF INTEREST.

By A. J. B.

— Austria plans $25,000,000 worth of public works, to relieve the depression in that country.

— The President decides to confine the official season at the White House to the month of January.

— The window-glass-trust factories, employing 15,000 men, resumed operations the 31st ult., after an idleness of five months.

— An Anglo-Russian alliance is urged “by writers in the National Review, who are conversant with the views of British Cabinet members.” In such an event, where would the United States come in?

— The ant, it is said, should receive much credit for the great fertility of Egypt. If these little creatures did not break up the alluvium deposits of the Nile into very minute particles, the soil would not be nearly so valuable for agricultural purposes.

— Dispatches from Manila state that the 700 school-teachers recently sent there from this country “find that without the commissary privileges their salary of seventy-five dollars per month cannot keep them in food. Very few, if any, of them can speak Spanish, and there is no prospect that they will ever learn to understand Tagalo.” Captain McLean, surgeon of the United States hospital at that place, writes that “it will be cheaper for the government to bring all the Filipinos to the United

States than to carry out this scheme,” and, to use his exact words, the teachers have raised “more powwow and disturbance than the whole army did during the palmy days of the insurrection.” Of course this is only one side of the story.

— A London dispatch of the 24th states that the British War Office “has distributed to the police offices throughout the kingdom, bills ordering all reservists, militia, yeomen, and volunteers to report themselves without delay to headquarters, with the view of active service.” A letter accompanied the bills, ordering them to be “kept in a safe place until telegraphic orders to post them up” were received. However, “the police of Lancaster overlooked the letter and posted the bills, causing wide-spread perturbation.” England is thus preparing for all emergencies.

— According to the Truth Seeker, of New York, a Baltimore woman has been obliged to apply to the police “for protection from her neighbors, who accuse her of being a witch, and persecute her accordingly.” “Baltimore,” says the same journal, “is the hotbed of Catholicism, and no outbreak of delusion should excite wonder.” While this is true, yet who shall undertake to say that there are not, in our day, persons who are possessed of the devil, as in the days of Christ? But no man should attempt the impossible task of driving out the evil spirit with carnal weapons. The Spirit of God alone can do that good work. A. J. B.