Revival Fruits and Political Corruption
Converts to Christianity as the result of a revival at Buenavista, Indiana, are giving practical evidence of a thoro conversion of life. One who raised a fine crop of tobacco last year, decided that the use of the weed was wrong, and burned all that he had. Believing also that the organization of Christ's church was of greater importance than any secret society, he threw his lodge pins into the fire and renounced his allegiance to several secret organizations. Another person made public confession to and full compensation for stealing some fowls many years ago for a boys' midnight feast. It is such work as this that true revivals always show, but they are not always public. That corporations spent $100,000 to elect Lorimer to a seat in the United States Senate was the startling disclosure made before the legislative investigating committee by Clarence S. Funk, general manager of the International Harvester Company. One says in comment: "No question has arisen in official Washington in the last generation that is regarded as possessing more sinister significance than these new revelations in the Lorimer case. Grave as this individual instance is, frank senators admit privately that it is only a symptom of conditions that are all too prevalent in the polities of the day." According to a letter written by John C. Ferguson, chairman of the Central China famine relief fund executive committee, to the Shanghai Mercury, three million people are starving in Northern Anhwei and Northern Kiang-su. The afflicted territory is within 150 miles of Shanghai. A steamer sailed recently for the Orient with 9,000 tons of wheat and flour for China and Japan. The Flores-Hale estate, comprising 12,600 square miles on Magdalena Bay, on the peninsula of Lower California, is to be sold for over $15,000,000. The section is rich in gold, copper, iron, niter, salt, and other minerals. The land is said to have been sought by the Japanese government just prior to the war game for a coaling station, but their offers were refused. Target shooting in the leading navies is becoming almost an exact science. In practise off the coast of Morocco, the British war-ship Neptune recently scored 100 per cent in hits at a range of five miles. When all navies can do that, says the report, sea fighting will become so fast that ten-minute battles would be ample to decide the fate of nations. A French savant, M. Gaumont, the inventor of a synchronized motion-picture phonograph, at a recent meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Paris gave an exhibition of what his invention would do. He darkened the room, and the machine presented pictures of himself on the screen while simultaneously a phonograph reproduced his voice. A bill was introduced into the New York Legislature requiring the Board of Education of the city of New York to furnish free eye-glasses to pupils in the public schools upon certificates from the principals of the schools that glasses were needed. An appropriation of $15,000 is required for this purpose. Nearly ten million feet of timber, board measure, is the amount of lumber involved in the order for ties which the United States Government wishes to place for delivery to Panama during the year. There are 230,000 ties for general railway construction. About eighteen miles east of Ocilla, Georgia, while midway on a trestle, an axle broke on the engine of a fast passenger-train and caused the collapse of the bridge. Ten were killed and a score injured as the train went into the river. The American Red Cross at Washington has received word that the United States transport Buford, carrying supplies to the starving people of China, reached Shanghai and proceeded to Nanking and Chinkiang to unload her cargo. Henry C. Peabody, associate justice of the supreme court of Maine, died recently in one of the court rooms at Portland, Maine. He had no intention of retiring from service, he said, unless "the Lord should interfere." In view of the fact that Great Britain has no less than 100,000,000 Mohammedan subjects, which it is said far outnumber the Christians of that country, a mosque is soon to be erected in London at a cost of half a million dollars. When a public school in New York was found to be on fire, the gong sounded the "quick dismissal" signal, and 2,900 pupils, thinking it was a drill, responded and marched out the building, entirely vacating the school in two minutes. The last spike has been driven in constructing the Copper River and Northwestern Railroad in Alaska. The road, which cost $20,000,000, is 197 miles long and is considered one of the most remarkable engineering feats of modern times. A severe snow-storm visited Transcaucasia, Asiatic Russia, the weight of the snow causing the collapse of many buildings. Sixteen persons were killed, and many travelers snowed up through the affected region. An international Negro conference has been called by Dr. Booker T. Washington, to convene in April next year at Tuskegee, Alabama. Preparations are already making for the convention. Dr. Wilbur Chapman and Mr. M. Alexander are engaged in an evangelistic campaign in the Holy Land, and will hold services also in Egypt, speaking through interpreters. At the little village of Throop, a short distance from Scranton, Pennsylvania, between fifty and sixty men and boys lost their lives in a mine disaster. Twenty-two convicts have made their escape from the State penitentiary at Pueblo, Mexico. Five prisoners and one guard were killed. Two hundred and ten indictments have been made against vote buyers and sellers in Floyd County, Kentucky.