NEWS AND NOTES

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 151, 27 June 1914, Page 14

NEWS AND NOTES

[The following items of intelligence have been selected from files received by the latest mail.] "We want a clean sweep of the incometax and super-tax, the substitution of an equitable, clear, and easily understood graduated scale, and personal declarations of income by all those with over £160 a- year," writes Mr. Chiozza Money in the Daily Chronicle. "The Chancellor who will put his hand to this work will not only earn the gratitude of the nation, but will make his own task an easy one." ■''The way in which prominent Toronto men who are charged with wrecking financial institutions escape from justice has becoirte a grave scandal," is the plain way the Toronto Globe puts It. The latest achievement in surgery, as may be inferred from discussion in the London Lancet, is the restoration of paralysed muscles by repair and replacement of injured nerves. When a nerve is severed ov greatly injured, the muscles supplied by it are cut off fiom communication with the source of vital energy, the brain, and become useless. Soon both muscles and that portion of the severed nerve connected with them begin to wasteland degeneiate. Until quite lately ifc was supposed that such muscle and nerve-wasting is incurable. 1 "War. gentlemen," said President Woodrow Wilson, speaking at Brooklyn, "is only a- sort of dramatic representation, tv sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I never went into battle, I neA'er was under fire, but I fancy that there are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire. I fancy ifc is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you. When they shoot at you they > can only take your natural life ; when they sneer at you they can wound your heart. And men who are brave enough, steadfast enough, steady in their principles enough to go about their duty with regard to theiv fellow men, no matter whether there are hisses or cheers — men who can do what Rudyard Kipling in one of his poems wrote : " 'Meet with triumph and disaster, 'And treat those two impostors just the same" — these are men of whom a nation may be proud. Morally speaking, disaster and triumph are impostors. The cheers of the moment are not what a man ought to think about, but the verdict of his conscience and of the consciences of mankind." A writer in the International Review makes bitter complaint of the indifference of the English press to the claims of commerce, as exemplified in .the scanty space given in reporting the annual meetings of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom : — "The British people- waxing fat and ever more prosperous are concerned with sport, with pleasure, idle gossip, ! women's gewgaws, barbaric head-dresses and shimmering silks., slit skirts and pneumonia, blouses, but they find commerce dull ; and since every country has the newspapers it deserves, the British people will have only themselves to thank if the press ceases to publish reports of commercial happenings that no longer interest. And while one can only deplore the complete estrangement of the nation from its true commercial life, a not less serious aspect of the preent tendency is the ridiculous glorification of the potty, the mercenary, and the niggling." ! A newspaper 152 years old has been found in a mousehole in one of the oldest houses in Epsom, England. It is a copy of "Owen's Weekly Chronicle ; Universal Journal," for the week "from ; 30th October to Saturday, 6th November, 1762," a two-page publication about llih. square. Though it is believed this j old paper must have remained screwed up in the mousehole for more than a century and a half, the news matter is very legible still. A serious act of vandalism was perpetrated in the famous Sieges Allee, in Ber- ! lin, recently. Four statues were badly damaged, and the beaks of several of the marble eagles which form the arms of the benches in the Allee were found to have been bioken off. Fragments of marble were discovered lying ah nit en all sides. A Frenchman, named Astier, who, at about the time of the outage, was seen to step over the chain surrounding one of the statues, has been arrested. In his pockets were found a stone of considerable size and ti strong knife. Astier is a pensioned surgeon in the French Navy, born at Vltry, atd his statements under examination leave no doubt that he is demented. "I am not going; to claim that fs'ihion in woman's dress is without its follies," writes _ Arthur Rackham, the artist, to The Times. "Good art will never exist without bad. But it is to women we owe it, and not to men, that art is still a. reality of everyday existence, » necessity, a desirable thing, the desirable thing, to be purchased joyfully at great expense of time and pains. In every class the art of dress is of all the- arts the most closely bound up with existence. Nor is this the only art that woman's nature demands. House decoration, the garden, the, flowers on the table, much of music and literature — these are hers. In everything where her means and opportunities allow woman seeks persistently for beauty. Is not that enough to justify the claim that hi keeping women out of public life we are narrowing down the possibilities of human development in the most foolish and short-sighted way?" IThe luminosity of vapours in vacuum tubes when exoited by electric currents is being studied with a view to producing a whiter light similar to that ot daylight, and M. Claude has invented a combination of a Neon lamp with an auxiliary iube containing mercury. Neon emits a soft pink light, and this, combined with the green light of mercury vapour, i& 4 stated to give an approximately white illumination. This is an important result, as the Neon lamp, j under good conditions, only consumes j about half a watt per candle, or, in | other words, is twice as economical as the ordinary household metal filament lamps. Some interesting work has recently been completed with the gas helium. A vapour lamp, prepared with a fairly pure_ helium, will, under certain conditions, give a white light much resembling daylight, and the character of the illumination can be controlled when j used on alternating current circuits so as to become bright j yellow or even violet. These remarkable results would, it is claimed, I enable varying colour effects to be pro- | duced for stage illumination by merely j controlling the electric current exciting the tubes. j The new wing of tiic British Museum ' — King Edward the Seventh's Galleries — was opened by the King lasfc^ month. It has been seven years in building, has cost in land and buildings more than a million pounds, and ( &dds approximately one-third to the exhibition space, being perhaps the largest of fcho ma-ny additions BHice Sniirke's building was begun in 1823. The front of the new galleries, with its facade of twenty lonic columns, flanked by two massive pylons, in Mon-tague-pla-ce, musfc rank as one of the dignified and satisfactory modern addi* i tion3 to Londoa's street architecture, j

The Rev. George H. Simu, pastor of the coloured Union Baptist Church, New York, brought a civil suit against Spiro Matiato, proprietor ot a restaurant, for refusing to servo him and two other coloured ministers. The case was decided by the jury in favour of Dr. Sims, who was awarded 100 dollars and costs. Dr. Sims alleged that ho wont into Matiato's restaurant, accompanied by the Rev. Granviile Hunt and the Rev. N. S. Epps, both pastors of coloured churches in tho city, and that, after he had sat down a-t a table, a waiter employed by Matiato told him that they did not serve coloured people in the restaurant. Though _ surprised at the affront, Dr. Sims said that he took the name of the waiter, and then all three left the place quietly. ■ The case was of the utmost importance to both coloured alid white Americans. Two young ladies were crossing a square in the centre of Nantes when one of them was seen suddenly to draw a revolver out of her pocket and fire on her companion. It had been noticed that the two girls were in violent dispute just before the shots were fired, but what was the surprise of the passersby who hurried to the spot to find that they were sisters. Helene de la Fleuriaye, the assailant, who is thirty^ and the elder by three years, explained, while her sister was being carried into a chemibt's shop close by, " Genevieve was always laughing at me, and saying that I was mad." It is pointed out that tlie two sisters were on their way to see their lawyer about a legacy which had been left them by their grandmother, and some people believe that this was at the bottom of the dispute. The use of hop substitutes in beer is sought to be prohibited by a Bill introduced into the House of CnmmoJis by Mr. Runciman. "Hop substitute," it is laid down, "means any bitter article or bitter substance which is capable of being used as a Mihstituta for hops in the brewing or preparation of beer." Last year 62,911,3761b of hops were used in the United Kingdom, and only 18,8851b of hop substitutes. "Our busy little statistical jugglers in Washington have figured out that there is much room for improvement on the part of American cheep men in the ha-ndling of their wool," remarks tho San Francisco Chronicle. "As a' result, Australian wool is being given tfye preference. It is claimed that we are lax in grading, separating, and packing our raw product. If this charge be true, American sheep men will do well to heed it, and lose no time in improving their methods. With a Democratic tariff Jaw designed to injure the wool industry of this countjy at every turn, American wool producers cannot afford to bo further handicapped by causes of their own making." Failure of the rice crop and the fishing industry have brought the districts of Tohoku and Hokkaido, Northern Japan, one of the worst famines that the country has faced in a hundred years. Cold weather prevented the rice from heading out, and unusually cold currents have kept the fish at great distances from the shore. A conservative estimate places the numboi who arc now in urgent need of food at^OOjOOO. "The tied-cottage system, the want of alternative employment, the absolute dependence on a few masters, «reate_ a society in whkh other classeft can dictate to them the conditions of their life,' 1 observes the Nation. "Joining a union is, of course, sufficient provocation in many -places, as we have seen during the recent country strikes. In some places, a man loses his home if his daughter has an illegitimate child or his son takes to poaching. Nowhere arc these Englishmen free men, as it is nhe business of Liberaliem to make them free men. From timo to time, since tho days of Cobbett, statesmen, or parsons or labourers, or the Frasers, the Sufiields, or an Arch, have tried to accomplish that, and have failed. If the Liberal campaign does not accomplish this, nothing that it doe& accomplish will save it from adding another disastrous failure to that chapter." The language used by {he Kaiser in his farewell letter to Prince Wedel, the retiring Viceroy of Alsace-Lorraine, has aroused the anger of both the super-patriots and the sticklers for German grammar/ says the Mail's Berlin correspondent. The super-patriots who make a speciality of combating such heinous practices >as the use of French menus at German dinners object to the Kaiser describing himself a 6 Princo W«del's "wohlaffektionierter (very affectionate) Emperor," the adjective being a. mixture of French ajid German. The grammarians are up in arms because the Kaiser used the antiquated phrase "und verbleibe ich (and I remain) instead of omitting the word "and" and beginning a new sentence with the words "I remain." They cay he has done the movement for "correspondence reform" an irreparable harm by falling back on the obsolete and "most detestable business language," which is tolerated by written usage but is really "bad German" and never used in conversation. A notable speech was recently delivered in South Africa by the Bishop of Pretoria, to which the Suffragette calls attention :— "There is a need to establish in South Africa a greater sense of chivalry towards women," he said. "We want to create public opinion, too, on the subject of the relationship of white men to black women. In the Transvaal, and, unfortunately, in other parts of South Africa, there is really a greater white peril today than there is a black. When I came across cases where white men have taken black women to be their mistresses, and when 1 ccc the black blood of their male relatives boiling, I wonder whether the brother or father of such a woman may not be working in Johannesburg in closo proximity to white women, with revenge ia his heart. " How a Yiewsvendor started betting at Sandown Park races with half a crown that had been given him, and won every time he put his money on a horse until he had over £70, was told to the Kingston Bench. Tho lucky man was Tlwmas Reddie, who sells papers outside Winibledon Station. He was summoned for drunkenness. It was stated that the police found him with over £70 in his pockets, and surrounded by a set of men who would soon have stripped him of all he had. ( When he was sober he was sent horne < in a cab, and he had followed the superintendent's advice to put the money in a bank. Reddie, who thanked the police for taking care of him, was fined 10k Cricket being still bo essentially A man's game, it is curious to recall that one of the most revolutionary changes in play — the introduction of round-arm bowling — was due 1o a girl. John Willis, who is generally credited with tho invention of the round-arm delivery, learned It from his sister. After it, severe illness he bought to regain his strength by getting his sister to bowl whilst lie baited. Finding her bowling very troublesome, and noting thai she turned her hand over tho ball in delivering it, he determined to adopt the method himself. At ; first the new style met' with great opposition, but ere. long received official jecognitiorij,