FROM HOME FILES.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XXXXI, Issue 7054, 25 October 1900, Page 4

FROM HOME FILES.

Volunteering is booming in England. At present over 300,000 are enrolled. The official figures previously obtainable showed only 229,854. Tho French Government is. taking short ways with Brazil for the lynching of a Frenchman at Rio Grande some months ago. It peremptorily demands an indemnity of £40,000 on behalf of the murdered man's family. Plough cattle being exterminated, an ingenious famine official has relieved the Indian Government of a superhuman difficulty by inventing a manplough. The unprecedented spectacle is now witnessed of men yoked to this implement. Despite heavy buying by the War Office, there was a fine show of horses at Bristol fair. Large prices were realised, tho best cart horses bringing d£loo, but the ruling prices ranged from £60 to £70. A capital lot of two-year-olds found ready sale at prices considerably greater than last year's, the pick bringing £40 each. The announcement is made that auriferous deposits have been found on the land owned by the Salvation Array at Collie River, Western Australia. "If we really do own a gold mine," said an official to a Daily Mail representative, " we shall, dt course, work it for all it is wnrth. Salvation diggers will flock there, and a Salvation mining camp will make its first appearance in the history of the Army." * It is a curious fact that that crowning mercy, the success of tho European armies in saving the Legations and in getting possession of Peking, has landed us all in a perfect blind alley 1 We have nobody get-at-able to punish and nobody get-at-able to negotiate with in regard to the preservation of order, and the substitution of • cosmos for chaos. — Daily Mail. The daily consumption of beer in London is said to be 419,000 gallons. In addition to this, over 12,000 gallons of spirits, and nearly 28,000 bottles of wine are (asserts the Temperance Record) drunk per day. But even all this does not quench London's thirst, for it is estimated that something like 34,000 gallons of coffee and 137,000 of serated water are disposed of in a day. One hundred thousand pounds of j snails are sold daily in thte Paris markets to be eaten by dwellers in Paris. They are carefully reared for the purpose in extensive snail gardens in the provinces, and fed on aromatic herbs to make their flavor finer. They are not only regarded as a great delicacy, but are reckoned, says the Caterer, as very nutritious. (Could we not open up an export of frozen snails ? There are" abundant supplies in Taranaki.) Mr Charles Garland has an article on high-speed telegraphy in the current number of " Knowledge," in whioh he says: — "The Pollack- Virag telegraph will send 100,000 words over a long wire in an hour. This is over 1600 words per minute. A column of the Times newspaper contains a little over 2000 words. So this wonderful apparatus could send nearly 2000 words in one minute, and at the same time print it on another receiving apparatus three or four miles distant." A month ago in Kansas City, in each of the fifty cars on the Westporfc Electric Line, which runs to the fashionable Hyde Park district, was displayed a large advertising card which demands in four-inch letters to know " How many minutes a day do you give to your God ?" The author of the effort, says the Cincinnati Inquirer, was a wellknown young man of business "who dons not see why the arts of advertising should not be brought to the aid of the pulpit." The enormous appetite of a champion cow is shown by the amount of food eaten daily during a test of the Holatein cow, Rosa Bonheur V., which died recently. She held the world's record for milk production of 10675 pounds in one day, and 72625 pounds in one week. She ate daily 114 pounds silage, 12 pounds corn meal, 9 pounds oatmeal, 3 pounds bran, 9 pounds oil meal, and 27 pounds roots, or a total of 174 pounds, of which 52-43 pounds was dry matter. She weighed 1,750 pounds.— American Agriculturist. " What Liberalism needs," asserts a powerful writer in the Fortnightly Review for September, "is not an imaginative philosopher of accomplished discernment making millennarian suggestions which paralyse his own party without abating the other. Liberalism is waiting for the appearance of the dynamic personality which not one of its present leaders possesses. It wants, in short, its W. J. Bryan or its Randolph Churchill — any type with the magnetic temperament and graphic utterance of the natural leaders of men." Julian Ralph in Harper's set himself the task of defining Lord Roberts' secret of success ; and he decides that it is this: He trusts every man implicitly until he finds himself mistaken in an individual; then it is not comfortable to be in that man's shoes. He is never angry. He controls bis temper as he does his appetite, for he never smokes, and drinks hardly at all. He lives in war as plainly as any colonel under him, to say the least. Beyond and behind and above all else that distinguishes him is this : that though he is a general among men, he counts himself, before God, a humble soldier, for, without ever introducing the fact, he is a devout Christian. It is announced that Mr Thomas Alva Edison, the "Wizard of Menlo Park," had perfected a device for producing electricity in quantities of commercial utility direct from coal, without the use of engines or dynamos, by a device much like the familiar thermopile. Mr Edison applies heat to the junction .of two pieoes of metal, whose composition is a secret, and thus gets , up a flotf of the electric current. Hitherto many inventors have sought ■ to achieve this result economically, but have failed, the current being ridicu- ' lou3ly disproportionate to the heat applied. Mr Edison does not state the degree in which he has overcome this difficulty, but declares that his invention will practically do away with the use of steam, and make it possible by electricity to run ships across the Atlantic in four days. He also says that under his new system private electric lighting plants may be maintained in houses at small expense. The Etna Real Estate Company, New York, announces that it will erect on the corner of Broadway and Thirtythird street the tallest building used for business purposes in the world. It will be thirty storeys high, and will cover a site 100 by 100 feet, and will cost, with the ground, £500,000. The printing of the British Museum Authors' Catalogue is now completed up to the end of 1899. Twenty years' labor on this monumental work has entailed an expenditure of about £2000 annually, or £40,000 in all. This catalogue is contained in 400 volumes and seventy supplements. Now that the Authors' Catalogue is out of the way, the staff are turning their attention to the compilation of a subject index, which is expected to keep them busy for ten years. Manchester hopes to save £1000 a year by municipal coal mines to run its municipal gas plant. It is officially reported that Italian eggs are now being largely exported to England. Wo earnestly trust that these will not include the lays of ancient Rome. — Punch. The British votes in the United States number 1,000,000. These will be cast pretty solidly against tho prcßocr Democrats. One of the lessons learned by the War Office in the rough school of Boer warfare is the need for turning out war materials in enormous quantities. In consequence, £250,000 is to be spent in extending the plant at Woolwich Arsenal. Pound notes to the number of half a million was the large issue proposed by the Glasgow Corporation; but the project was defeated at the meeting of the Town Council by 28 votes to 17. The treasurer, in opposing the scheme, pointed out the difficulty in keeping the notes in circulation. If they were passed though the banks, he said, they would be at the Corporation office next morning for their gold equivalent. Mr John Boekfeller, the American " oil " king, has the not entirely enviable reputation of being the richest man in the world. He is said to enjoy, or at least to have, an income greater than tbe combined incomes of all the

sovereigns of Europe. Hia wealth, however, does not bring him happiness, for he confesses to envying the poorest of the victims of the " Oil Trust," while the man who could afford Luoulian feasts every day of his life is condemned by some complicated digestive trouble to a prison-fare of milk and bread. New York city has now come into line with every city and every State— with the exception of far-off Nevada— in America. Henceforth, those who take part in the disgusting and degrading exhibitions of prize-fighting will be treated as ordinary felons. New York State is to be congratulated on its brilliant victory over Tammany, which for its own pecuniary gain legalised a practice that is utterly repugnant to the vast majority of people throughout the United States. If Lord Roberts becomes Commander-in-Chief it is most devoutly to be hoped that the office of Oommanderin-Chief will be greatly modified, and that its holder will become the real military head of the Army, and not merely a general holding an important post in the War Office, as he is at present. At present the Commander-in-Chief is not Cominander-in-Chief in any true sense. He has certain definite and important duties, no doubt, but there are several other military officials who have powers equal to his, and at best he is only primus inter pares. — Spectator. This is the centenary year of the introduction of the rifle into the British Army. It is also the jubilee of submarine telegraphs. The Salvation Army have received a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition for their American exhibit, showing their methods in reclaiming the fallen and outcast. Manchester City Council has adopted a sewage scheme, which is estimated to cost £487,000. The Jungfrau railway has been abandoned, because the cost turned out to be heavier than the engineers expected. Ira D. Sankey, the famous evangelist, is revisiting England. The estimated cost of the Philippines to tbe United States is 750,000 dollars per day, and the toll of human life is also heavy.