p. 20 | News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · May 23, 1912

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— Serious rioting is reported among the striking anthracite coal-miners throughout the Schuylkill valley region in Pennsylvania.

— Thirty thousand tons of old junk, left by French engineers, has been shipped away from the Isthmus of Panama and sold for more than $2,000,000, and there is much more yet to be sold.

— Canada is about to start a mint for the coinage of gold, which will make the use of United States gold coins unnecessary. Hitherto our $5 and $10 gold pieces have circulated freely there, and several millions of United States gold may soon have to come home.

— Postmaster-General Hitchcock has ordered that all picture post-cards, papers, and magazines that are unclaimed at post-offices shall be given to local authorities for distribution among hospitals and asylums, instead of being sent to the dead-letter office at Washington, D. C.

— An American bridge-building company has secured the contract for building a state railway bridge over the river Jumma near Allahabad, India. Twelve leading bridge-building concerns from all over the world competed, but the American company's bid was 26½ per cent less than that of any competitor.

— The secretary of the treasury wishes to reduce the size of the dollar bill and its brethren of more imposing names. He thinks he can save about $600,000 a year in paper, printing, and other items if he is permitted to cut off an inch and a quarter from the length of the currency and a half-inch from its width.

— In the fear that the foundations of Grant's tomb, in Riverside drive, New York City, have been weakened, Park Commissioner Stover has ordered an examination of the subsoil and rock upon which they rest. A visit to the plaza surrounding the structure revealed large fissures and rents in the pavement, and the sinking of the stones in many places.

— A dangerous growth of reactionary sentiment is reported from Peking, China. Another Manchu uprising is believed to be imminent. The Manchus are gathering arms, and many of the princes are said to be handing over their fortunes to make the movement successful. President Yuan Shi Kai is seriously ill. He was the one strong man of the authorities in Peking, and during his illness the authorities of the republic are said to be doing nothing to prevent the threatened outbreak. Newspaper correspondents at Tientsin say that capitalists of south China, recognizing the impotence of the existing régime, are financially backing a scheme for the restoration to the throne of the imperial Manchu family. The cabinet of the republic has asked the consent of the National Assembly at Nanking to establish the provisional capital of the Chinese republic at some point south of Peking, leaving the selection of the permanent capital to some future time.

— Last year that gay city Paris was gayer than ever before, if one may judge from the money spent on amusements — nearly $12,000,000, a record sum. Grand opera received the largest share of this amount, $658,400. The rest was divided principally between the theaters, forty in number, averaging $117,580 each; music-halls, whose total receipts were $1,417,800; café concerts, which took in $1,379,000; and cinematograph shows, which received about $500,000.

— One thousand pounds has recently been refused for a rickety old chair in South Africa, which is declared by experts to be worth three times that sum. The explanation is that the old chair originally belonged to Louis XIV of France, and was later bought by the British government and sent with other articles of furniture for the use of Napoleon at St. Helena. But the ship changed her route or was driven out of her course, and was wrecked off the Cape of Good Hope, and the chair was saved from the disaster.

— Attorney-General Wickersham has appointed Stanley W. Finch, chief of the bureau of investigation of the Department of Justice, a special commissioner to suppress the white-slave traffic. Mr. Finch will begin a vigorous campaign in every State in the Union for the extermination of the vice. He will cooperate with societies and individuals interested to wipe out the traffic by a systematic and comprehensive plan of investigation and prosecution and by placing agents in every State in the Union. About 600 special officers will be employed in this active campaign.

— General William Booth, the aged head of the Salvation Army, is said to be losing his sight. On one of his preaching tours, while standing up in his automobile, a fly was blown into one eye, and before it could be removed the eye was poisoned and a cataract began to grow. An operation was apparently successful, but now the other eye is so badly affected that the general is compelled to give up work, and physicians fear his sight can not be restored. In his eighty-fourth year, this remarkable man was about to start on a preaching trip through America and Canada, but this has been abandoned.

— In the Khargeh Oasis, a shallow and flat depression in the Libyan Desert, about 1,500 square miles in extent and lying 130 miles west of Luxor, archeologists and anthropologists have been making a close study of a people that is believed to be more closely related to the inhabitants of ancient Egypt than any element in the population now resident in the Nile valley. It is not a very high grade of culture that Dr. Alex Hirdlicka, reporting to the Smithsonian Institution, finds among these descendants of the old Pharaohs. A painful living is scratched out of the soil by means of constant irrigation, and the dietary problem among the majority of inhabitants is extraordinarily simple — "rice in rice time, barley in barley time, and dates in date time." They live in tenements of dried-mud construction, roughly planned, and giving the suggestion of cliff dwellings. The population, numbering something short of ten thousand, is of poor physique, unenterprising, and harmless.

— The King's Indian crown, which was used at the recent durbar, will be placed in the Tower of London with the other regalia, but will be available for future imperial durbars. The cost of the crown was $291,600.

— Thirteen thousand nine hundred sixty glass eyes, of all colors and sizes, were sold at auction recently in the Jersey City post-office at twenty-four cents each. The eyes were seized by the revenue officials some months ago.

— Swedish and Norwegian are to be taught at the next summer school of the University of Minnesota. These languages are accepted now as entrance requirements, and may be studied in the college and graduate schools of the university. Either language may be substituted for German as a requirement for the doctorate in philosophy or science.

— Comprehensive and spectacular plans for the organization of a great aerial army powerful enough to defend the entire coast line of the United States, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Panama are now complete at the War Department. Under the direction of the signal-corps an entirely new arm of the service will be immediately organized, provided Congress gives its consent.

— The minister of finance and the bankers representing the six powers — the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan — have arranged the terms of a series of advances to the Chinese government, totaling $50,000,000, against treasury bills redeemable within one year, by the proceeds of the big loan. There will be supervision over the expenditures jointly by foreign and Chinese auditors.

— Yuan Shi Kai, president of the Chinese republic, delivered his first presidential message in the form of a speech recently, at the opening of the session of the advisory council, which is practically a provisional senate. The president proclaimed that the principles of the new Chinese government must be the maintenance of order in the interior, the achievement of progress, and the retention of external friendships. The attitude of foreign powers in recent years, he said, had been such as to merit the gratitude of China. He also stated that religious liberty throughout the republic would be guaranteed.

— The general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church is now in session in Minneapolis, Minn., and unless that body overrules the action of the committee on the state of the church, the part of the famous paragraph 260 of the church discipline which especially prohibits dancing, card-playing, and kindred amusements, will remain a law of the church. Of the progress of Methodism an exchange says: "There were eight annual conferences represented in the general conference of 1812. There are now 132 annual conferences and 29 missions and mission conferences. Then the church-membership was 184,568, with 688 traveling preachers; now we have a membership of 3,518,099 and 20,569 preachers, while American Methodism numbers more than 6,000,000 members. In 1812 there were no Sunday-schools reported. Now we have 36,486, with 387,968 officers and teachers and 3,562,968 scholars."