CURRENT TOPICS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 13948, 3 January 1906, Page 6

CURRENT TOPICS.

A young English lady, who is a governess in Odessa, gives a simple, but vivid account of the reign of terror during the Jewish massacres in the course of a letter which the “Daily News” has published. There was a panic in tho city, she say®, because everyone believed"! that the massacres were to be continued, and that students and teachers, and all those people known as “ intellectuals” were likely to be murdered. Her pupil’s people went on board an Austrian warship for safety, and she herself took refuge with an English family. Her host had already been to the Jewish quarter. “He went to the places where the dead Jews had been taken,” she says; “they wore lying thick on the ground, and you had to step over them. They were so frightfully mutilated, and you could see how they had been tortured to death. Women and others came while he was there and recognised their dead, and ho said that they went into hysterics and laughed as if they were mad. Som 6 of the victims were so frightfully disfigured that it was impossible for their nearest and dearest to recognise them. There were women with their breasts cut off, women disembowelled, and women who had suffered nameless tortures. There wore bodies burnt and half roasted, men who had been killed by nails being driven into their skulls, and people who had been nailed up to beams by their feet.” In four days 2240 murdered J ews were buried in trenches, without coffins, and hundreds more were buried privately. On the fourth day it was ascertained that 18,000 people were left without heme or covering, and charitable people had taken charge of 600 children who had lost both fathers and mothers in tho massacre. One priest protested against the barbarities ; lie was at once arrested. “ Intellectuals ” who went to tho assistance of the Jews were shot down. “You who have never lived out o 7 safe little j England,” concludes the letter, “can’t imagine how it is to he as we are now. Nobody feels secure of hie life for a day. Wo don’t trust policemen or soldiers, who are put there apparently for our protection. We don’t believe Kaulbars when he gives our Consuls his word of honour that if another attempt at massacre be made he will put it down at once, and wo shrink from every policeman we eco: we keep as far from the sentinel® a® possible.”

THE EEIGX OP TERROR.

Tho unemployed have been very much in evidence in tlio heart of London during the last month or two. At tho end of November they held a huge demonstration in Hyde Park. They came from north, east, south and west, with banners flying, drums beating, pipers piping, tho tootling of flutes, and the rattling of collecting boxes, to take part in the united “protest against the Government's treatment of the unemployed problem.” Possibly by the time all tho local contingents were mustered on tho Thames Embankment the procession contained 8000 souls. How many of them were genuine unemployed, men anxious for work and unable to got it, it was impossible' to say, but what struck observers most about the pro? ecssionists'was tho alarming proportion of very young fellows, mere boys of eighteen or nineteen apparently, and men still on tho sunny side of thirty. Many of them were indeed poor sped-

this rXIOU'LOYED.

mens of the British race, but there were some strong, sturdy young fellows, on whom the pinch of poverty had left no outward and visible sign save in their garments. Among the older men were many who, to judge by their appearance, had done little work for many years, and a few poor old lel lows were present whom no ma n wanting a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay could employ. Their spirits might be willing, but their flesh was certainly too weak for them to longer indulge profitably in the work their hands had been used to do. In Hyde Park the processionists and their sympathisers wore duly harangued by half a dozen speakers, including an inflammatory gentleman, who hinted plainly that the only way to make the Government act was for them to sack Mayfair. Of course, at the end of the speech-making the usual resolution was passed with acclamation. On this occasion it ran;—“That this great demonstration of London’s unemployed workmen emphatically protests against the idea that charity is a cure for, or even a mitigation of, the ovil of unemployment, and demands that the Government shall recognise the elementary right of every man to gain his bread by honest labour, and shall summon Parliament to initiate great works of national utility. This assembly further declares unending war on the capitalist system and its upholders, which condemns honest and willing workers to idleness and starvation.” Experience suggests, however, that the millennium will be at ham;l before a capitalistic body like the British Parliament will think of carrying such a resolution into effect.

Some interesting biological and sociological facte have recently bean published about women, which are calculated to exalt the ostensibly weaker sex in its own eyes as well as in those of -mankind. Mr T. H. Montgomery, an eminent English biologist, after a general review of the data presented by the anatomy and evolution of various invertebrate and vertebrate animals, maintains that the male is less developed and more embryonic than the female. So far as the invertebrates and the lower vertebrates are concerned, the female is clearly superior. When, within this field of observation, one sex is found to be rudimentary in comparison with the other, this is almost always the male. In size the female is usually superior. Sometimes the central nervous system is more highly specialised in the female, while, as a rule, the internal reproductive apparatus is mors complex. In those cases where the male seems, at the first glance, superior, the difference turns out to be mainly in unimportant morphological characteristics. Many species of infects seem to got on altogether without males for at least a generation. The miniated queen bee, for instance, will lay fertile eggs, which, however, produce only "drones. Several generations of offspring will, similarly, proceed from the female aphis before the intervention of the male is again required. It appears, therefore, that upon certain planes of organic existence there is no question of women’s rights. Nature herself has assigned to the male a role altogether secondary or casual. Passing from biological analogues to the existing numerical relation of the sexes among human beings, an English sociologist computes the present preponderance of women on the surface of the globe at slightly over 7 per cent, and predicts that this disparity will grow annually greater. Indeed, ho estithat in the year 3140 the final triumph of women will be witnessed in Great Britain, when there will be 100 per cent more women than men, and that twelve centuries later there will be only one man to every three women.

ABOUT WOMEN’.