Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1894 — NOTES ANO COMMENTS. [ARTICLE]

NOTES ANO COMMENTS.

Chicago has thirty-five railroads with land terminals within its borders; Kansas City has 16, St. Louis 14, Philadelohia and Pittsburg 10, Boston 8, and New York 5. The great Eastern metropolis, however, evens up on ferry lines, which carry an average of one million people a day "across the Hudson and East rivers. Tall iron towers are no longer considered worth erecting. The preparations for the grand exposition of 1900 at Paris include the removal of i the Eiffel Tower, if designers prefer its removal, and the still higher iron i tower for Wembley Park, London, has been stopped for want of funds. I Work ceased before its four great i legs had been united at the first I platform. The performances of the Austrian Archduke Eugene at Domstadtl have inspired a great deal of hero worship I there. While visiting the little town he observed with interest the threshing of corn on a farm, and asking for a flail he joined in the work with the men and women, while half the village ran to see the unwonted spectacle. As the Archduke is a strikingly handsome man of unusual height and noble bearing the snectacle was •one to be remembered.

According to recent statistics, there are about 2,000 women practising medicine on the continent of North America, of whom 180 are homoeopathists. The majority are ordinary practitioners, but among the remainder are 70 hospital physicians or surgeons, 95 professors in the schools, 610 specialists for the diseases of women, 79 alienists, 65 orthopedists, 40 oculists and aurists, and finally 30 electro-therapeutics. In Canada there is but one medical school devoted exclusively to the training of medical ladies, but in the United States in 1893 there were ten, one of them being a homoeopathic establishment.

Asiatics are learning, for the first time in a generation, something about the strength of the United States navy. Since the civil war the Asiatic station has seldom had a considerable ship in its squadron. The Baltimore is the only considerable modern ship that this Government has sent to the station, and even now half of the ships of the squadron are small and old-fashioned. It used to be said in the navy that certain ships were kept on the Asiatic station not only because they were of sufficiently light draught to ascend Chinese rivers but as well also because they were totally unfit to come home across the Pacific.

In a recent sermon the Rev. C. F. Aked, of Liverpool, England, declared that slavery still exists in England. “Think of St. Helen’s in Lancashire,” he said, “and the condition of the chemical laborers there. There, engaged in the very foulest work, men labor one hundred and twelve hours one week and fifty-six hours the next, or one hundred and sixty-eight hours in the fortnight, or an average of twelve hours a day all the year round, scared and burnt by the flying particles of caustic; their teeth destroyed by acids and their internal organs, as revealed by post-mortem examination, blackened by the vapors. These men drink, and so would you drink, madly, till death released ‘you from your sufferings.”

Sensible readers will, in the opinion of the New York Times, take their war news, whether it appears to come from Chinese or Japanese sources, with a liberal dilution of doubt. But one thing is abundantly clear from the tenor of all the dispatches, and that is that the Japanese have far more enterprise, dash, and initiative than the Chinese, and these qualities go a long way in war. It is not denied, either, that the Japanese are entirely united and very much in earnest, while there is great doubt whether the mass of Chinamen care anything about the matter. In fact, the Chinamen are so numerous and so stay-at-home that to them, except upon the coast and the frontiers, a foreigner is not a conceivable creature. Their whole world is China. No doubt, if the torpid empire could really be got into motion it would crush the Japanese by mere force of numbers, but as things are, the moral qualities of the Japanese will go a long way to counterbalance their inferiority in numbers and resources.

On the steppe near Borki, that point on the railway where an accident happened on 1888 to the train carrying the Russian Imperial family, rises a church built in the Muscovite style of the seventeenth century. It was erected, adorned, and filled with paintings by the subscriptions of the faithful in all parts of the empire, and cost about $125,000. A high cupola is surrounded by six conical towers. The fronts are in yellow brick, elaborately ornamented with designs in which the doubleheaded eagle is conspicuous. A chapel has been built into the embankment near the rails where the Emperor’s coach was pitched off the track The mural and other paintings in church and chapel are by Prof. Makoffsky, whose paintings are well known in New York. A park has been planted about the church. In the chapel is a record of the names of twenty-three persons killed and thirty-six injured in the disaster. Work has been going on for three years or more; the inauguration took place last June.