Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 February 1894 — NOTES AND COMMENTS. [ARTICLE]

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

A list of serious accidents occurring in English football games in the course of the present season shows that there were twenty-eight deaths and 10ff players badly injured. Thebe are 25,580 negro schools now in the South, where 2,250,000 negroes have learned to read and most of them to write. In the colored schools are 288,000 pupils and 20,000 negro teachers. There are 150 schools for advanced education and seven colleges administered by negro presidents and faculties.

Minister Lepixe, of the Paris police, has requested the newspapers to refrain from publishing pictures of Anarchists. His theory is that vanity is a very powerful motive in the Anarchist mind, and he hopes that their activity may be quieted to some extent when they find that their portraits are not published. A colony to be operated on strictly Communistic principles has been organized in Vienna. It is to include Americans, Englishmen and Germans, and will settle on lands in the Kenia district of British East Africa, about 250 miles above the mouth of the Tena River. The colony will include some well-known Anarchists and Socialists of Austria. The reclamation of the arid wastes of Southwestern desert lands proceeds marvellously apace. Another reclamation company was incorporated at San Bernardino, Cal., a few days ago, with a capital stock of $2,500,000. A dam is to be erected at Victor Narrows, on the Mojave River, in San Bernardino County, 150 feet in height, which will make a lake nine miles long and about three wide, whose waters will be used to Irrigate about 200,000 acres of land on the Mojave desert, which will then be especially adapted for growing raisin grapes and alfalfa.

The Sultan of Turkey has lost none of the attributes traditionally associated with the position he occupies. There is a general idea that every Sultan is a sac-simile of his predecessor, and each in his turn spends his life on a cushion smoking, or arranging the affairs of his harem. Abdul Hamid does not live up to these ideals. He is addicted to carpentering and makes some of his own furniture. He is reported ns taking no interest in his many better halves, and as devoting much attention to such sanitary arrangements as may prevent an epidemic of cholera. Tiie Fall River cotton mill corporations do not appear to have been suffering greatly from the hard times of 1898. The annual statement of thirtyfour corporations, owning fifty-six mills, shows that they have paid in dividends during the year $1,622,000, which is an average of 7 9-10 per cent, on a capitalized stock of $20,878,000. One mill paid a dividend oi»20 per cent., and several made from 10 to 12. The workpeople in these mills felt the pinch, however, for there was a reduction of wages during the year of from 9 to 16 2-8 per cent., and there were shutdowns of from two to nine weeks.

England has a national union for the technical" education of women In domestic science, whose purpose is the training of teachers in the three most needed domestic branches—cookery, laundry work and household sewing, with home dress cutting. The association embraces many schools, both in England and Scotland, where teachers are trained In the economical methods of work especially suited to the circumstances of the working classes, as well as in the cooking required by those of more abundant means. Examinations of a high standard, both in theory and practice, are rewarded with diplomas, giving assurances of thorough training" of the pupils. This training includes daily lessons of several hours in length, lectures, with demonstrations and actual practice in the subjects taught, and special courses are provided in first aid to the injured and nursing, in domestic economy and sanitary science. I Outside the larger towns, public road making in Arizona, where prairie and mountain trails are the only wagon routes, has not advanced beyond the wheel tracks 5 of primitive times. For the most part a little shovelling is the only work that has been done, ami that only at the crossings of gullies and where the trail lies through canons. In the outskirts of towns irrigating ditches frequently cross the road, and their overflows and washouts, which occur more or less frequently, may cut dangerous gullies in the highway or conceal it in a wide shallow lake. Wooden bridges and culverts have been tried on much-travelled t rails, but they are apt to disappear, as the native Mexican population regard them as providential gifts to remove for their own private purposes. Where the road skirts the edge of gullies, rains and floods often undermine the sides, which, falling off in sections, leave a sheer wall, it may be, fifteen or twenty feet high. By successive slouchings the trail is encroached on in places and a detour must be made. Thus a stage ride in a broken country is likely to be exciting to the point of apprehension, even with an experienced driver who knows the route and the probabilities of its shiftings. One of the worst tramp-ridden States in these hard times is lowa, which, being a rich farming country, presents a tempting field for their depredations. The scenes of 1887 are being repeated. During the summer of that year the vagabonds poured into every town of the State, and in such numbers that the authorities, in order to avoid riot and pillage, gathered them in public parks and fed them, finally calling on the militia to conduct them out of The tramps of 1898 do not seem to threaten the peace, but nevertheless they are a great nuisance. They keep, clear of the larger towns, finding the country full of resources to which they can help themselves without much risk. In bands of ten and twenty they break open the school-ho.useß, and levy on the wood arid coal-bins to build fires in the stoves. Some of their number go out to forage for provisions, which they get by theft and intimidation. The evenings are snent in eating, carousing, and card

and dioe-playing. Sometimes the neighbors band together to dislodge their unwelcome visitors, but it is not always an agreeable undertaking. In the cities of lowa charity associations have been organized to feed strangers as well as the local destitute, but the professional tramp prefers the free-and-easy time which he has in the country. The New Orleans Picayune prints a table of the land barons of Louisiana and their holdings of unimproved timber and swamp tracts, from which it appears that alien syndicates, companies, and individuals own more than 2,200,000 acres. One syndicate claims 400,000 acres, several possess 100,000 and more, and holdings of from 20,000 to 90,000 acres are not uncommon. Most of this land is owned in the Western Btates, but to capitalists of New York and Philadelphia several, hundred thousand acres belong. The Picayune explains that originally the United States owned all of the lands in Louisiana other than those which at the time of the cession by France were held by private persons or corporations. Subsequently what were known as swamp lands, that is to say, lands that were subject to tidal overflow from the sea or were annually flooded by the Mississippi, became the property of the State, with the provision that it should sell them for the purpose of raising a fund to build levees. A considerable territory, consisting of prairie and forest, land, was retained by the United States to be sold ns homesteads. Such a disposition was made of this land, but it is now’ largely in the possession of syndicates. The Picayune's table includes the swamp, homestead, and Boa-marsh lands. The last named, a lion’s share of which has been acquired by the Watkins syndicate, must be drained and diked like the Holland coast, and some progress in this work has already been made.