Current Events by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 3, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 39.

Current Events

By Editor

The wholesale price of refined sugar was advanced September 12 to seven cents wholesale in the United States. That is the highest figure it has reached for twenty-two years. It is thus that the sugar trust pays the Government fine. There are seven billion pounds used annually in the United States. The raise of one fourth cent a pound means 175,000,000 dollars a year of extra profit to the sugar trust. This means that all manufacturers that use sugar to any extent, as in candies, will either advance prices, or diminish the amount sold, or substitute saccharin. The excuse is that there is a scarcity of sugar.

One of the aristocratic set of Massachusetts sought to bury her aristocratic pet dog in Lexington cemetery; but the local police, aroused by the patriot superintendent, protested and stopped the burial. The woman sought to have the dog buried in the family plot, directly beside her husband's body. She buried the dog temporarily at home. It is thought that she will contest the order.

Mount Etna, a despatch from Sicily, September 14, declares, is vomiting a perfect avalanche of fire at surrounding towns; 20,000 have fled from the vicinity, and the towns of Castiglione and Francavilla are threatened with destruction. The peasants are erecting before their vineyards and humble homes a cross of sticks, placing upon the top of it pictures of the Madonna and the saints; but these superstitious acts have not checked the flow of lava.

Riots still continue in numerous towns in the southern province of Italy, on account of the cholera epidemic. The ignorant people believe that the doctors and government officials sent to fight the disease are merely assassins in disguise, who poison wells and fountains, and scatter a mysterious little powder which is the real cause of the cholera. So much for the intelligence of a people that have been under Catholic instruction for centuries.

A ministers' club of Berkshire, Massachusetts, September 11 adopted a resolution scoring the Rev. Joseph Lambert, of Elmwood Temple Congregational Church, of Providence, for marrying John Jacob Astor and Madeleine Force. The resolution reads: "The members of the Berkshire Ministers' Club, and guests present at this meeting, desire to place themselves on record as disapproving of the marriage in another State of a man forbidden by the courts of a sister State to remarry. We express regret at the misuse of the ministerial office, and the stigma brought upon the denomination of Christians to which he belongs. If clergymen defy the just requirements of the civil courts, they set an example that is fatal to our well-being as a nation, and

destructive of good morals." All of which is probably true; but we would like to apply this same principle to ministers who are regardless of the "just requirements" of the Lord of heaven and earth, who declares: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. . . . The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God." If ministers persist in ignoring God's command, do they not by so doing set a far more grievous example, fatal to "our well-being" and "destructive of good morals"?