News and Miscellany by Editor

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 12, 1912

News and Miscellany

By Editor

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— More than 21,000 persons arrived in New York last week, returning to their homes after spending the summer abroad.

— The figures for the drink bill of England are staggering. Last year they were $813,986,145, an increase of more than $25,000,000 over 1910.

— The New York Bible Society distributed in July more than 50,000 Bibles, an increase of more than 100 per cent over the distribution of any previous month.

— The funeral of the late emperor of Japan will cost $1,000,000. Of this amount $750,000 will be provided by the government, and the remainder from the emperor's private funds.

— The inhabitants of the island of Nicaria in the Ægean Sea, recently occupied by the Italians, have petitioned the European powers to be united to Greece. They claim that Turkish misrule is unbearable, and they desire autonomy.

— The funeral services for General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, were held in London, August 28, and toward the end were converted into a great revival meeting, during which thousands accepted the invitation to come to the "mercy-seat."

— Four hundred girls, dressmakers, employed at a Brooklyn factory, are on strike against the use of profanity by the foremen and other male employees of the shop. They demand that foremen and others be instructed that no profanity or abusive language shall be used in the workrooms at any time.

— Suit has been begun by the United States government to dissolve the so-called moving-picture trust. The defendants are said to print from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 feet of these pictures a week, controlling from 70 to 80 per cent of the film business. Their capital stock is represented as being $100,000,000.

— London was recently for a time cut off from telegraphic communication with the rest of the country and with the continent, and connection with America was also severed, by a fire in the general post-office, in which building the central telegraph office is situated, and where all the wires of the service are concentrated.

— The national monument to the forefathers on Monument Hill in Plymouth was struck by lightning and badly damaged recently. Several large stones in the heroic figure of Faith, which is the center of the group, were displaced, and the tablet inscribed with the names of the Pilgrims who came in the "Mayflower," was blackened by the lightning.

— The discovery of a secret revolutionary conspiracy against the Chinese republic has led to the capture and imprisonment of the leader. Documents and badges found indicate that the secret movement had already chosen officials to take the places of those now in power. The unearthing of the plot has caused quite a sensation in Chinese circles around Hongkong.

— Julius Rosenwald, a leading Chicago merchant, made birthday gifts amounting to $687,500 on his fiftieth birthday, all going for charity and education.

— As a result of torrential rains on September 2, throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, thirty-six persons are dead. The damage done to property is estimated at $1,500,000.

— All ships going five miles out to sea from American ports must be equipped, after September 15, with life-saving service sufficient to save all passengers and crew.

— In addition to the 600 foreign visitors to the eighth annual congress of applied chemistry, over 2,000 of the most prominent manufacturing chemists in the United States attended the deliberations of that body, which opened in Washington, D. C., September 4.

— It has been officially announced that the British government will make a formal demand upon the United States government for arbitration of the British claim that the Panama Canal Toll Act, as recently passed by Congress, violates the Hay-Pauncefote treaty.

— One passenger and five trainmen were killed, three other persons were fatally injured, and twenty-one were slightly hurt September 1, when train No. 112 on the Lake Shore division of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, running thirty miles an hour, was derailed two miles north of Lyndhurst, Wis., as the result of a washout caused by a cloudburst.

— A revolutionary plot was recently formed on the battle-ship "Ivan Ziatoust," of the Black Sea fleet, to seize the Russian imperial family on the imperial yacht and compel the czar to abdicate. The plot miscarried, and sixteen seamen and a petty officer were all arrested and then shot to death. The czar, the czarina, and their five children were all on the imperial yacht, being conveyed from Yalta to Sevastopol.

— A new and striking example of the efficiency of medical science to repel one of the most deadly forms of disease, plague from our shores, has been afforded recently. The strict measures taken by the public health service have successfully prevented the bubonic plague, which has broken out in Cuba and Porto Rico, from spreading to our mainland. As is nearly always the case, the plague started in China — its practically inexhaustible storehouse. The officials in the health service have carefully watched its progress across the Pacific and around the lower end of South America, jumping from island to island and from port to port. Its sudden appearance in the West Indies was the signal for prompt action. No incoming vessel is now allowed to land until it has been thoroughly fumigated to rid it of rats, which are the principal carriers of the disease germs. All vessels lying at anchor at any pier are required to have large rat shields on all hawsers, and to keep guards at gangplanks to prevent rats from landing. At the same time, war on rats has been declared in all coast cities, and a tremendous slaughter of rodents is the result, in addition to keeping off the much-dreaded disease. Fifty cases of bubonic plague were discovered in the islands to the south of us, but so far as is known not a single case has broken out in the United States.