Current Mention

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Sep 29, 1904

— Lady Curzon, wife of the viceroy of India, is critically ill in London.

— King Peter of Servia, who was placed on the throne by the assassins of the late King Alexander and Queen Draga, was crowned at Belgrade, September 21.

— The Iroquois theater in Chicago was reopened September 19, after undergoing repairs at a cost of $100,000. Many citizens of Chicago protested against the reopening.

— The list of victims of the great storm which recently swept the Atlantic coast has been swelled by the news of the foundering of the schooner “Alvira French” off Long Island, seven of the crew being drowned.

— News from the war in the far East reports more fighting at Port Arthur, a combined attack being made by the Japanese land and sea forces. The Japanese captured two forts, and appear to be slowly but surely making their way toward the inner defenses. Some reports indicate that a battle at Mukden is imminent, and others give the impression that the Russian forces are about to abandon that place, and retreat to Harbin, four hundred miles north.

— An electric car containing thirty-two persons was blown to pieces at Melrose, Mass., September 21, by striking a fifty-pound box of dynamite that had fallen off an express wagon. Six persons were killed outright, three more died of their injuries within an hour, and nineteen others on the car were taken to the two hospitals, suffering from severe injuries. So great was the force of the explosion that all but ten feet of the rear portion of the car was blown into small pieces, while windows within a radius of a quarter of a mile were shattered.

— Railway accidents have been unusually frequent of late, the record culminating September 24 in one of the worst wrecks ever known in this country. Two passenger-trains on the Southern Railway came together in a head-on collision near Hodges, Tenn., each moving at full speed, and the

greater part of both trains was demolished. The first reports place the list of killed at fifty-four, with one hundred and twenty injured, many of the latter being seriously and some fatally hurt. A peculiar feature of the accident is that it occurred in daylight, the engineer of one of the trains having disobeyed orders by running by the station where he should have stopped, his action being explained only on the supposition that he was either asleep or dead at the time. Both engineers were among the dead.

— A recent dispatch from Hidalgo, Tex., stated that the Rio Grande River was seventeen miles wide at that place, and that a short distance below, the channel of the river had been changed by the flood, so that a slice of land embracing several hundred acres and occupied by some thousands of sheep and goats, which before the flood was in Mexico, has been transferred to the Texas side of the stream. At Presidio, Tex., 600 persons were left homeless, and all crops for a distance of 100 miles below and 150 miles above that place were destroyed.

— Last February the country was shocked by news from Mississippi of the burning at the stake of a negro and his wife at Indianola. The negro had killed a white man in a quarrel, and his wife, it seems, was not guilty of any crime; yet she shared her husband's fate. Now some of the mob who participated in the lynching have been brought to trial, among them being the brother of the murdered white man; and a United States senator (Senator McLaurin) has made a plea before the court in his defense, in which he advances the idea that the killing was justifiable and necessary in view of the riotous conditions caused by the crimes of the negroes. Thus it appears that civil government in this “land of the free” has degenerated to the point where a United States senator will stand up in court and justify lynch law, and such lynch law as burns a woman at the stake for the crime of her husband.