Notes and Comments.

Feilding Star, Volume III, Issue 763, 28 December 1908, Page 2

Notes and Comments.

There are two unusual features in to-day's news that will be read with j mixed feelings by everyone, and hi j both items Americans are the central j figures. One refers to the disclosi ures of municipal corruption iv Pittsburg, a very wealthy and important industrial centre, and the other concerns the prize fight between Burns and Johnson. With regard to the i latter event, which took place on '< Boxing Day at Sydney, not a few , of our readers will have a feeling or ; disgust — but they will read the de- ! tails of the fight. It seems to have been a one-sided contest, and thu Canadian had a taste of that grul- { ling and torturing at the hands of the negro, that he had dealt out to Squires, Lang, Moir, O'Brien, and Hart. It was the latter who gave Johnson a beating in America some two or three years ago. There is no doubt that strong feeling will be aroused in Australia against any furI ther fights, for the details of the Johnson-Burns fight are of a degrading nature. It was a brutal display, in which race feud, played some part. When in America Burns had always drawn the "colour line," and in his hour of opportunity on Saturday the negro took the revenge of his race on the body of Burns. The exposure of municipal "graft" in Pittsburg will have something of the same effect on the wholesome-minded and honest section of the people of America that the fight in Sydney will have upon the same class in Australia — it will harden up their determination to remove those things that tend to degrade the "individual and sap the national morality.