WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 7, 3 October 1927, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

The city of St. Louis has seen a variety of disasters in its history, but the present tornado, if the estimates of its destruction are anything like accurate, has the biggest amount of havoc to its credit, for 75,000,060 to 100,000,000 dollars’ worth of damage to property, in the space ot five minutes, is pretty rapid. The tornado of 1896 was more destructive than stated in the cable message. It occurred on May 27, not November 27, and in the space of twenty minutes 10,000,000 dollars’ worth of property was destroyed, and 300 people were killed, not 100, as stated. In the present case the reported death-roll at the time of writing totals only 79. In the 1896 tornadp 8500 buildings were wrecked, and fire followed the disaster, but was, fortunately, checked by a deluge of rain.

Until within the last few years St. Louis was the fourth city of the United States, ranking next after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, but Pittsburgh has lately displaced it from this position. San Francisco comes next in point of population. Sixty years ago St. Louis rivalled Chicago in importance, and ran neck and neck with it in population. It is a very solid and substantial city, and the” greatest tobacco manufacturing centre in the whole wide, world. It forged steadily ahead .without the booms and slumps of Chicago, nut the latter city picked up decidedly more in its booms than it lost in its slumps, and forty odd years back began drawing rapidly ahead to its present place as the second city of America, to say nothing of being reputedly the wickedest city on earth—though the Holy City of Mecca is said by the connoisseurs to be really wickeder

Although the St. Louis folk in the race for population have been left far behind by Chicago, they have the satisfaction of knowing that the latter city is a mere upstart, dating back barely a century to the time when Fort Dearborn was established on its site. St. Louis, on the other hand, was St. Louis as far back as 1764, and in 1808 had reached the dignity of being an incorporated town with a Mayor. Fire, floods, and epidemics have repeatedly worked havoc in the city. A great fire in 1849 burned the riverside levee, destroying docks, steamers, and warehouses to the value of 11,200,000—a figure, by the way, arrived at by the city assessor and not by the American newspapers of the period. In the same year occurred the worst of the numerous epidemics of cholera that have in the past afflicted the city. On this occasion 4000 persons died of the disease —one death, to every twenty persons of its population. In the seventies smallpox raged for three years, carrying off thousands. Great floods have occurred on nine or ten occasions, and in one, twenty-three years ago, the river rose no fewer than 38 feet above its usual level—and one can imagine what that meant to a riverside city."

The American tornado is a very de-' structive affair while it lasts, and the fortunate thing for the United States is that cities cover a very small portion of the earth’s surface, and most tornados merely rip up a- few farm buildings out in the open country, dropping down barns and byres maybe a mile or two away. According to Dr. W. J. Humphreys, meteorological physicist to the United States Weather Bureau, practically the only other part of the world in which tornadoes are known is Australia. In Australia they have even more open country to romp around in—for they are particularly fond of the emptv interior—and it is only now and then that some wav-back township finds itself in the track" of one and is blown to smithereens.

The Australian-tornadoes are not to be confused with the tropical hurricanes which hit the northern coast of Queensland and the nqrfn-western coast of West Australia. These are a different type of storm, though they can be disastrous enough, as, for instance, that which swept Port Douglas on March 16, 1911, and practically wiped out the township. Port Douglas was a weather station, but there are no records of that storm, for the very good reason that the meteorological instruments went to smash with everything else. Queensland had its fiercest hurricane season on record in 1918, in January 20-21, of which vear twenty people were ’ - lled in the thinly populated district in the vicinitv of Mackay No records of the intensity of this storm exist, either, for much the same reason as at Port Douglas. Two months later sixteen lives were lost in another hurricane m Northern Queensland.

Though Europe seems to have bad a pretty poor apology for a summer, this does not appear to have interfered with the ultra-fashionable seabathing craze. At the really aristocratic seaside resorts, such as the Lido at Venice, society dines in pyjamas and bath gowns, during the rest of the day, apparently, dispenses with even these garments A "Daily Mail” correspondent, who has been investigating what the German aristocracy is doing in the matter, found it distinctly behind the times. At the very high-class seaside resort of Bansiti, on the Baltic, where everybody’s pedigree appears to be inquired into in advance by the hotel proprietors, they have only got as far as breakfasting in bathing costumes at the leading hotels, and still change into real clfithes for the midday meal.

However, Bansin is advancing. Says the correspondent: “As I was passing the front garden of a villa on the seafront this morning, I saw a young woman standing on her bead. An older woman, in a sky-blue bathing suit, who was tall and stout, and whom I took to be the mother of the younger, tried to perform the same feat but only succeeded in turmpg several somersaults. The advantage of coming to an exclusive place is that one can do things like that. Bansin is so exclusive, so aristocratic, so bureaucratic, so loval to the <ae Kaiser, and so frightfully that what the people_who are pefimtted to stay in it do is obviously right and in the finest taste. THE RIDER. I wave my cap. I shake my reins, I flit across the heather. The light blood sparkles in my veins, Mine and my steed’s together. What tun? of Fortune’s giddy wheel Awaits tne as I wander 1- do not know. I only feel Something that calls me yonder. A merrv-hearted maid to woo, A fox to chase with ardour. Perchance the flash of bright steel too—— , , Strike, boy, and I’ll stnke harder. I know not, care not, what remains. I flit across the heather, The light blood sparkles in tny veins, Mine and mv steed’s —Gamaliel Bradford, in the “Souths West Review.”