AMERICAN NOTES.

Evening Star, Issue 9775, 3 August 1895, Page 2 (Supplement)

AMERICAN NOTES.

The New York 'Outlook' comments Beverely upon the rejection by the Senate of that State of a Bill intended to reform the school system, and complains that this. Senate seems to be as much under Tam many control as that which it superseded. A meeting of the teachers, called to hear an explanation of the measure by its advocates, was most unruly; the scenes of disorder are B»id to have been suoh as would have disgraced a meeting of avowed Anarchists, and to have afforded ample evidence that the present school system has imposed upon the City of New York a great number of wholly undisciplined and incompetent teachers. The same journal complains that the reform of the police force in that city has been thwarted by the passing of a Bill through the States Legislature which profesaed to effect it. There is no provision (it says) for a thorough sifting and reformation of tho present force, while'the Reorganisation Bill has, apparently, been " side-tracked." It is added, however, that the new Police Board appointed by Mayor Strong appears to be efficient, earnest, and resolved on reform.

The Wisconsin Legislature has approJiriated £37,500" to construct a new building or the library of the State Historical Society, which will be erected upon the grounds of the State University. The library thus transferred to the University is one of the three or four most valuable historical collections in the country, and the general library of the State University with this accession will probably rank next to that of Harvard in the number of volumes it contains.

New York City, with all its enterprise, never has established a real public library. It is now intended to unite the Astor, Tilden, and Lenox institutions, whose joint funds will amount to over £1,600,000, forming thus a central institution, which will have various branches, and will be both a reference and a circulating library. Nearly 400,000 books and pamphlets (very few of which are duplicates), some of them old and rare, beside a collection of pictures, wi l ! thus be brought under one management. The Constitution submitted to the voters of Utah—and certain to be accepted—contains many provisions of unusal interest. The clauses relating to women suffrage not only guarantee to women the right to vote on the same terms as men, but also to hold office and to perform every public duty except service in the militia. Plural marriages areforever prohibited. The Legislature is required to establish public schools, free f rbm all ecclesiastical control, throughout the Territory, and thus the prohibition of polygamy is made doubly secure. In a manner contrasting sharply with the policy of most Western States, no one is to be permitted to vote in Utah until he has become a full citizen of the United States. The conservative reform of the jury system is likewise to be embodied in the fundamental law of the new State. In civil cases, when threefourths of the jury agree, the decision is binding. This change does away with the anomaly of permitting the opinion of one man on the side of the defendant to outweigh the* opinions of eleven men on the side of the plaintiff. In criminal cases no one can gain and everyone must lose by an unjust decision against the defendant, and the old requirement of a unanimous verdict was in accordance with public policy. But in civil cases the interests of the plaintiff are no more sacred than the interests of the defendant, and the law should guard them with the same caro. The requirement of an agreement among three-fourths of the jury secures deliberation in cases of doubt.

Up to Ist May last the Treasury deficit of the United States was 40,000,000J0l for the current fiscal year. In the ten months ended 30th April the Government paid more than 118,000,00l)dol in pensions. The ' Outlook ' comments :—-" Against genuine pensioners no one has anything to say ; it is the. fraudulent pensioners who constitute the cause of the above deficit, and who represent a large proportion of the amount paid out in pensions every year. That entire amount is U0.000.000d01. Within the past six years the number of pensioners has more than doubled, and the annual expenditure has nearly doubled. In 1872 President (then Congressman) Garfield declared that the pension payments for that year (30,000,000 dollars) probably indicated "the high-water mark."

The special agent of the Agricultural Department of the United States says that the adulteration of food, drink, and drugs costs the citizens of that country the enormous sum of one billion dollars per annum. Before one of the New York sub-commit-tees of investigation the Bubject of gas measurement received attention. The State inspector said that gas meters registered differently as the weather was wet, moist, or dry, and that the gas made by different companies would register differently on the same meter.

The Bill lately passed by the State Legislature of Tennessee provides that the nature of alcoholic drinks and narcotics, including cigarettes, and their eifects upon the human system, shall be taught in the schools of that State as thoroughly as other regular subjects, and that no certificate shall be granted to any person to teach in the public schuols whohaanot passed a satisfactory examination on these subjects. The Bill takes effect on January 1, 1896. Tennessee is the third State to pass the scientific temperance instruction Bill during the year 1895, the other two being South Carolina and Indiana. There now remain but two with the " black cap "—Arkansas and Georgia. A short time ago the American newspapers were full of accounts of a murder case in Kansas, in which it was asserted that the actual murderer was acquitted and another man convicted on the ground that the latter " hypnotised" the former into committing the deed/ The judge who presided over the trial Las now made a statement of the case in a legal journal, in which he says: "The question of hypnotism was never raised, never was insisted upon, either in the evidence, the arguments, or the instructions." The case was simply this: M'Donald, the perpetrator of the act, was tried before one jury and acquitted, while Gray, the instigator of the deed, was tried before another jury and convicted, and the Supreme Court of the State, upon appeal, confirmed theverdict. Whether oi notM'Dunald was rightly acquitted doe 3 not appear, nor does it concern the present inquiry. Whatever the merits of the decision, having been acquitted, M'Donald could not, in accordance with one of the fundamental principles of our Anglo-Saxon liberty, be again put in jeopardy of his life for the same offence. He was a young man about twenty-one years of age, and of a yielding disposition, in the employ of Gray, who was a man fifty-seven years old and of indomitable will. The origin of the false and mischievous report that hypnotism was the deciding plea was that the counsel for defence remarked: "We might almost say that Gray possessed hypnotic power over M'Donald"; and when the latter was acquitted a reporter, on the scent for sensations, wrote up a graphic account of the trial, making the statement which has been going the rounds of the world. There are now prevailing within 200 miles of New York three serious local epidemics of typhoid fever, and the agent of infection in each of these was the milk delivered by one dealer. The germs of the disease had"been introduced into the milk from one original case of the fever, the milk cans having been washed, or the milk adulterated in each instance, with the water of a well into which the germs had been carried by house drainage. In the small city of Stamford, twenty miles from New York, there are 340 cases which thus originated in the pollution and infection of the milk distributed by one man. Repeated examples of this kind do not, however, cause municipal authorities to provide for the sanitary inspection of milk supplies and suburban dairy farms.

TALL BUILDINGS. Very high buildings have ceased to bo a novelty in New York. The number of suoh structures will be largely increased during the next twelve months, and the cost of those on which work was recently begun, or which are under contract, will exceed 25,000,000d01. This list does not include Astor's new hotel (sixteen storeys, 8,000,000dol), or a dozen other buildings from twelve to twenty-three storeys high, which are now approaching completion. Your correspondent writes in a room on the twelfth floor of a structure overlooking the City Hall Park, and on the other side of a narrow adjacent street sees the rising walla

of the American Tract Society's new build-' jng, the steel frame of which is finished to the roof, which caps the twenty-third storey. Within an eighth of a mile there are a down now buildings fro-n ten to fourteen storejs high. Two blocfc3 away, on the corner where the' New York Herald' was housed for many years, and where Baraum, the famous showman, began his carm- with a museum fifty yeare ago, there is now to be erected, on a. lot f.6ft by 100 ft, an office building of twenty-three storeys. This will face the post office. Nearly half a mile southward in the neighborhood of Wall street, the Exchange, and the financial houses, the number of lofty structures is increasing '■■ rapidly. The most notable of the new ones j is the building of an insurance company, now almost finished, one hundred teet square, twenty storeys bigh, with outer walls of white marble. This reminds one of an enormous monument pierced with windows. It overlooks old Trinity Church and its historic graveyards. The first of the tall buildings in this city was erected with thick, self-sustaining walls, in which the outer parts of the steel frame were imbedded. That method of construe- [ tion has been abandoned. The steel cage now bears all the weight; the stone or brick walls are thin, and are attached to and' carried by the steel frame. By using such walls much valuable renting space is saved—enough in a large building to yield 10,000dol a year or more in rents. Great sums are expended upon the foundations far down below the surface, where the bed-rock' is reached by the caisson method, and huge cantilevers are placed for the distribution and support of the great weight above. The lower part of New York Island is narrow, and owing to the concentration of financial business there the ground space has eome to have great value. These buildings, whose occupants are served by swiftly-moving elevators or "lifts," very perceptibly enlarge the floor space available for business purposes. As a rule they are as nearly fireproof as structures of stone and steel can be, except that the interior finishings of the rooms are of wood. Thus far they have not been exposed to a conflagration, either here or in Chicago, where scores of them have been erected, and the effect of great heat upon the steel cages remains to be exhibited. The construction of such buildings on each side of a narrow street is to be deplored from a sanitary point of view, but it is permitted here. The upper storeys of the most trustworthy of the high buildings in this city are commonly preferred by tenants, because of the superb views from them and the comfortable ventilation in the warm season, and the top floors of several of the towering structures have been taken by trade clubs.—' Argus's' correspondent.