PERPLEXITY OF NATIONS

The Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · December 18, 1879

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 54, No. 25

PERPLEXITY OF NATIONS.

ASSASSINATION as a fine art, Nihilism and social anarchy, industrial prostration, commercial stagnation, national bankruptcy, a dying empress and a crazy emperor, is Russia's greeting to the world. Austro-Hungary takes up the doleful refrain and groans about the renewal of floods in Hungary, cities destroyed, millions of property swept away, crops annihilated, and 200,000 people starving in Silesia. Germany joins her deep voice to the chorus of wretchedness and tells us that business is stagnant, the banks are idle, commerce is dead, merchants are failing, houses are empty for lack of tenants, while the people sleep in the fields, and even in the streets of cities. Ireland continues her never-ending song of woe, and complaint of nakedness, of starvation and of disorder. Merry England braces herself against her troubles and puts her best foot foremost, but the world sees the millions of her starving artisans, in spite of her efforts to keep up appearances. Italy has the phylloxera and floods laying waste her vineyards, Spain her fairest provinces swept by a deluge. France, the most prosperous because the most thrifty and frugal of European nations, is not without her troubles, for she is threatened with a relapse of her worst disease, political fever. And all this in one day's dispatches! Surely it does not look as if the millennium were coming.—Detroit Evening News, Dec. 10.