Earlier text: NEWS AND NOTES

Different Estimates

There is a reason why millionaires are being added on the one hand, and paupers are being multiplied on the other, in these bountiful United States. Here, as elsewhere, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” By way of illustration, it was recently stated in the United States Senate that a noted business man had sent the following message to the President: “What are 258 human lives and a ship like the Maine worth compared with the loss to trade and commerce of New York City and of the United States?” This estimate of human life is widely different from that of the Saviour, who valued one soul above all the wealth of the whole world. “What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

Wealth Heaped Together for the Last Days

Mr. J. A. M’Call, president of the New York Life Insurance Company, was recently summoned to Washington by President McKinley for a conference about financial matters. Mr. M’Call assured the President that New York could and would promptly furnish $500,000,000 if necessary to prosecute the war against Spain. Five hundred million is a large sum of money for the wealthy men of one city to be able to loan to the government so promptly. There is plenty of treasure, and, just as the apostle James has told us, it is “heaped” “together for the last days.” In studying the money question, that is so prominently upon the minds of all, we should not neglect a careful and frequent reading of the fifth chapter of James. This scripture is a clear exposition of the subject.

The Civil Authorities

The civil authorities of Plainfield, N. J., have decided that work done on Sunday by observers of the seventh day, in order not to be “to the disturbance of others,” as the exemption law provides, must be done so secretly that nobody except those engaged in it will know anything about it. [See p. 276.] This is about the value that this exemption for those who observe another day will have, in the heat of a Sunday-law crusade.—American Sentinel.

Russian Increase of Population.

Russia, whose population was formerly largely rural, is meeting the same tendency manifest in other nations, namely, the increase of city population. Twenty years ago the number of towns in Russia whose population exceeded 100,000, says a recent writer in the New York Observer, was only eight; now it is nineteen, and in ten years it will probably be thirty, as eleven more towns have populations between eighty and ninety-five thousand. Certain Russian cities have risen at a surprising rate. Moscow in five years increased its population by 20 per cent.; St. Petersburg, by 22½ per cent.; Odessa, by 24; Rostoff, by 78; Tula, by 68; and Lodz, the great iron city, rose from 150,000 in 1892 to 314,780 in 1897, 109 per cent. Perhaps more important still is the increase of the population of the empire as a whole. In 1851 European Russia contained not quite 53,000,000; in 1897 it was over 94,000,000. Poland, in the same period, and notwithstanding the general political dissatisfaction, has risen from 4,750,000 to 9,500,000; and the Caucasian provinces, so rich in minerals, and so fertile, have sprung in the most remarkable way from 4,500,000 in 1851 to 9,750,000, in 1897.

A Better Man, and Why Not?

A Christian brother, writing to the Herald of Christ that he had given up tobacco, and had asked God to take away the desire, says that his prayers have been answered, and adds: “It has been two months since I stopped using it, and I have had no desire for it since. Strange to say, I had been using it to an excess for sixty-three years, and now I am going into my seventy-ninth, and my mind is clearer and brighter; and, thank the Lord, I feel better in every respect since I quit the use of it than I did when I was only fifty.” And such will every one who quits it for Christ’s sake find to be the case. If God does not take away the desire, He will give strength to overcome the habit.

Teaching Schoolchildren to Kill

This is what Mr. Herbert N. Casson says in Our Dumb Animals: “The glorifiers of war are poisoning our national life. They are teaching the school-children that war produces heroes, and drilling them with guns and swords. We might truthfully write over some of our high schools, ‘This is a school for murder.’” And is not this true if the school teaches them how to kill?

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