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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 12, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 18.

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ITEMS OF NEWS

By Editor

-The national debt was reduced nearly $10,000,000 during the month of April.
-The Marquis of Salisbury succeeds Beaconsfield as leader of the Conservatives.
-Hon. Ansel Briggs, the first Governor of Iowa, died May 5, at Omaha, aged seventy-five years.
-The Postmaster-General says that he will not rest until every official implicated in the Star-service frauds is dismissed.
-A Catholic congress will be held in Madrid, Spain, in October, which will be attended by Catholic notables from every part of the world.
-Mayor Harrison, of Chicago, refused to attempt to enforce the closing of saloons on Sunday. He says he "takes no stock in Sabbatarian nonsense."
-The Chinese immigration treaty and the commercial treaty were both ratified by the Senate on the 5th. There seems to be equal rejoicing by both Americans and Chinese.
-While some school-children were playing under a small tree, in a yard eight miles east of Winona, Miss., on the fifth inst., lightning struck the tree and instantly killed three of them.
-Over 150,000 persons visited Central Park, New York, Sunday, May 8. The fair weather induced large crowds to resort to Coney Island and other seaside places in the vicinity.
-About 500 switchmen employed in Chicago on the various railroads have struck for an advance of wages. If persisted in, incalculable damages will result to shippers and the railroad companies.
-May 7, a fire broke out in the shaft of a coal mine near Scranton, Osage Co., Kan., cutting off the supply of air from the miners, of whom there were 22 in the mine. The total loss of life was 10.
-Mrs. Fletcher, an American "medium," has been convicted of imposture in London and sentenced to imprisonment for twelve months. Her "psychic force" was believed by the jury to be a fraud.
-The Anti-Jewish crusade in the old country is not diminishing. Two hundred persons were injured in the riots at Elizabethgrod, Russia. In West Prussia fresh excesses have been committed, and many families have fled for their lives.
-May 4, the British sloop of war, Doterel, was blown up in the Strait of Magellan. Eight officers and one hundred and thirty-five men were killed; three officers and fourteen men escaped. It is supposed that the boiler burst and exploded the magazine.
-May 6, a freight train on the Texas Pacific railroad went through a bridge, killing the engineer and fireman, and wounding the conductor and a brakeman. In another wreck at Katula, on the same road, the engineer, a brakeman, and a telegraph line contractor were killed.
-A Baltimore dispatch says: Henry Ward Beecher, in passing through here, was served with a summons to appear and answer in a suit against him by the Directors of the Western Maryland Agricultural Fair, for failing to perform his part of a contract which bound him to lecture before the Fair last October.
-A dispatch from Deer Lodge, Montana, says that the Grand Jury has indicted ten Mormons, including two Bishops, for unlawfully voting in Montana for delegate to Congress. One hundred Mormons residing in Utah and Idaho are said to have voted for the Democratic candidate in Montana under assurance of protection.
-The Herald says: The sense of the city and the country has been so fully taken upon the proposal to have an International World's Fair in New York, to be held in 1883, that there need be no misapprehension as to the public opinion. The idea is not popular, nor does it grow in popularity. The wisest plan now is to abandon it altogether.
-The vast treasure which had been amassed by the Sultan Abdul Aziz, mysteriously disappeared after his assassination, and the Ministry gave out that it had been used for war expenditures. Recent inquiry, however, seems to show that a considerable part was appropriated by high officials connected with the palace, and who are supposed to be the instigators of the assassination.
-Dillon, the agitator, has been arrested. In his speech a day or two before his arrest he advised the people to keep within the law, not because he respected it or thought they respected it, but for the sake of preserving their organization. They must exercise their ingenuity to sail as close to the line as possible. It is said that his arrest has had a quieting effect upon the people.
-The Utes in Colorado are getting troublesome. The Commissioners have no influence over them, and dare not go among them for fear of inciting them to an outbreak. The Indians are held in by threats to remain in the valleys, and they regard the prospect of a fight with the soldiers with derision, and boast that they can defeat all the soldiers that the Government is likely to bring into the fight.
-Troy, N. Y., is suffering from the lack of a Police Superintendent. A dispatch from there, May 4, says: "The Police Commissioners balloted eleven times to-night for a Superintendent, without result. There is talk of a Vigilance Committee in South Troy, if the depredations are continued. In the absence of a police force to-day, the roughs fired a load of straw, burning that and a tenement.
-Hostilities continue in Tunis. A fight occurred recently in which the French are reported to have suffered the greater loss. It is said that the mountains are alive with Arabs armed with flintlock guns, each man carrying thirty charges of ammunition. It is impossible to calculate their number. At the bombardment of Tabarca, Tunis, by the Frevet, 58 Tunisian soldiers and a large number of non-combatants were killed.
-In the Baltic provinces of Russia there is much agitation among the peasants, who desire absolute ownership of land now held on lease. The Lutheran pastors in many parts of Estheland have refused to administer the oath of allegiance to the Czar, or do so with manifest reluctance. Handbills have been distributed, calling upon the inhabitants not to swear allegiance until the Czar has granted them lands and land rights equal to those possessed by the Russian people.
-The flood at St. Louis, which was fast driving the people from their homes, has subsided sufficiently for business to be resumed. A dispatch of May 7 says that several of the railroads leading out of the city have done wonders within a few days in repairing the damages incident to the late inundations. The Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Council Bluffs run trains regularly to Atchison and north to Bigelow. The St. Joseph and Western are running as usual, and the Missouri Pacific announces the opening of its entire line.
-A dispatch from Fond du Lac, Wis., says that gold-bearing quartz has been discovered a few miles from that city, in a ledge of lime rock. The quartz shows nine feet above the surface of the ground, and reaches to an unexplored depth below. Some specimens taken from the top of the drift assayed $21 per ton: others, taken from six feet below the ground, assayed $148 per ton. A company of Boston capitalists have secured the working on a lease of the farm, and have a stamp mill and other mining machinery on the way. They expect to begin operations within two months.
-Turning to the Universalist Year-Book for 1861, for the statistics of 1860, we notice a marked decline since that time in the number of their parishes. In 1860 they reported 1,264 parishes in the United States; in 1880, 856—a decrease of 308, or about twenty-five per cent. in twenty years. Of this decrease 133 were outside of New England, and 175 in New England; as follows: In Maine, a loss of 48; in New Hampshire, 43; in Vermont, 18; Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, lost one-third, and New Hampshire more than one-half of their Universalist parishes since 1860, according to the figures given in their own Year-Books.
-Secretary Lincoln is reported to be the most beset of any of the Cabinet officers. His visitors, however, are mainly of a different nature from the office-seeking hordes that throng the doors of the other Secretaries. They come to pay their respects to him as the son of the greatest President. A legion of the lowly are waiting in the corridors of the War Department every day, and when the Secretary appears they reverently shake his hand and look upon him with devoted eyes; and, with the same kind heart and consideration that so endeared his father to these people, Robert Lincoln has time and kind words for the poorest and most infirm of them.
-The Queen of Madagascar is a Christian woman who adorns her profession and honors her throne. Under a former treaty with France importations of rum were allowed, and a portion was assigned to the government as revenue. She has forbidden her people to drink it, and warned them of the evil consequences of its use. Better than all she caused the barrels of liquor received as revenue to be broken and the contents to be poured upon the ground. "I cannot take a revenue from anything that will debase and degrade my people." These words are worthy to be printed in gold, and presented to every so-called Christian ruler in the world, many of whom derive millions of revenue from the tears, and groans, and crimes of their people in the shape of liquor.
-The popular pastor of Surrey Chapel, London, has an article on revivals in the New York Independent, in which he expresses his full agreement with his friend, the Rev. Dr. Cuyler of Brooklyn, that "the progress of the church does not keep pace with that of population." In London, he says, as in the most of the large towns, there is a diminished attendance. There are not sittings in the churches for more than one-fourth of the population, and these sittings are now not more than half filled. His conclusion, after much inquiry, is that as to church members there is "not only no increase to announce, but a very large diminution to lament; and this with a rapidly increasing population." He is quite unable to agree with Dr. Cuyler, however, in saying that most of the accessions to his church have been the result of special revival effort. The 2000 received on profession of faith during the 26 years of his pastorate, not 25 had been brought in through revivals, including that under Mr. Moody, of whose converts he has not more than three remaining in a membership of 1300. As the result of a six months' revival in Hull, 1000 members were added to the one district. In three years "not fifty remained on their books." His conclusion is that revival "machinery is but mockery." What is needed is "the steady, quiet prayerful work of the church."