Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1895 — NOTES AND COMMENTS. [ARTICLE]

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The Paris Exhibition of 1900 is to oost more and to contain a larger area of buildings than the Chicago World’s Fair. Part of the scheme for laying out the grounds consists in the destruction of the Palais de I’lndustrie and the conversion of a part of it to exhibition purposes. A curious use for a husband is reported from Clerkenwell. near London, where a Mr. Lamb and his wife keep a small shop. For fourteen years the firm has avoided paying taxes by the wife’s sending the husband to jail to serve out the legal time for unpaid taxes, while she remains at the store attending to business. It is a surprising fact, stated by Mr. Joseph Choate in a recent address. that England with her 30,000,000 of people in round numbers, does not have so many Judges to attend to her legal controversies as any one of our larger States. She finds thirty-two of the first-class ample for all her wants, while New York has 140 and Illinois 178. Dr Burggrave, of Ghent, who has passed his hundceth year, has written a book on longevity. The only way to live long, he says, is for each person to live according to his proper individuality, to select what is good for one’s self and to avoid all else. In other words, one must live as nearly as possible in harmony with his surroundings. The contented mind, the happy heart—these things prolong lite more than dieting and regular hours of sleep. Mrs. Jonathan Rowe, of South Atkinson, Me., who has been totally blind for twenty years, experienced an odd partial recovery of her sight a few days ago. She suddenly became able to see quite distinctly one afternoon about 2 o’clock, but her vision was totally obscured again in two hours. Since then she has been able to see every day between about 2 and 4 o’clock In the afternoon, but during the rest of the twenty-four hours is as blind as formerly. A glance at the list of new mills under construction throughout the country for the six months ending July 1 shows that the building of mills in the South is going on at a rapid rate. In North Carolina the building of thirty-one new mills has been begun, and costly improvements are being made upon a number of old plants. In South Carolina twenty-two mills have either been erected or are in course of erection. In Georgia the number of new mills under construction Is fourteen, in Alabama it is five, in Texas and Virginia three each, in Arkansas two and in Louisiana one.

In a letter to the London Times Bishop Tugwell, of western Equatorial Africa, says that the natives are killing themselves with drink furnished to them by the Christian merchants of Europe in return for the native commodities. On the way to a certain town, he says, he was told that the whole town was drunk, and he found it to be the case. ‘ ’Legions of bottles, ” “met my eyes on all sides; warehouses of prodigious size filled with intoxicating drinks; canoes heavily laden with demijohns of rum; the green boxes in which the gin is packed are here, there and everywhere." The Secretary of the Navy has detailed a commander and a lieutenant of the Navy to conduct a speed trial of the American Line steamship St. Louis, to determine whether she meets with the requirements of the Ocean Mail Subsidy act, calling for a maintained speed of twenty knots an hour for four hours. The officers detailed for this duty will leave New York on the St. Louis, and upon arrival at Southampton the vessel will be made ready for the trial, which is ordered to take place over a course in the English Channel on some day between August 14 and 24. The course will be 100 miles long, and will be carefully measured by the officers sent out to conduct the trial.

The farmers of the Northwest are again experiencing their customary difficulty about getting men to harvest their crops. The St. Paul and Minneapolis newspapers have reports of the scarcity o( help throughout Minnesota and the two Dakotas. An illustration of the demand is found in the statement from Adrian, in the southwestern part of Minnesota, that from 500 to 1,000 men will be needed in that corner of the State alone during the next few weeks. Good pay is offered, SBS to S4O a month, or $2 to $2.50 a day, for harvest and threshing help, and in many cases the report is that none >s to be had at these figures. One difficulty in the case is the fact that such employment lasts for only a few weeks, but another element in the problem is th 6 disinclination of men to leave the cities when they might better their condition by going into the country. The inexhaustible energy of Editor Stead, of the London Review of Reviews, appears to have found a new outlet. He has discovered that one of the wants of the modern world is a convenient baby exchange. There are families of too many children, and there are couples who have none. There are homes desolated by bereavement, and others that are rendered almost as unbearable by the influx of a superabundance of little ones. There are infants that have been deprived of their parents by death, and there are families of young ones that have succumbed to the grim destroyer. At present no medium of exchange exists that would tend to equalize the supply and demand, or to establish the balance between those who have too many babies and those who have none. Mr. Stead is convinced that an exchange of this kind, and the extension of the practice of adoption, would have the effect of alleviating much misery. In the complete Indian census report just published an interesting attempt is made for the first time to cast up in figures an aggregate of the Government expenditures on account of the red men residing within the United States since the Union was established, in 1789. The result of t>Ma Attemnt indicates A* UkSSta-

tistics presented that the gigantto sum of *1,105,219,872 was spent by the Government up to the year 1890, either upon the Indians directly or indirectly because of Indians. Counting in, however, the civil and military expenses for Indians since then, together with incidental expenses not recognized in the official figures given, it is safe to say that up to June 80, 1895, a further sum of *144,780,628 may be added to the aggregate figures, making a grand aggregate of *1,250,000,000 chargeable to Indians to date. The Indian wars under the Government of the United States are stated to have numbered more than forty, and to hove cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including about 5,000 killed in individual encounters, of which history takes no note, and of 80,000 Indians, including 8,500 killed in nersonal encounters.

By a recent decision reported in the American Lawyer, a person who signs an instrument without reading it, when he can read, cannot, in the absence of fraud, deceit or misrepresentation. avoid the effect of his signature, because not informed of the contents of the instrument. The same rule would apply to one who cannot read, if he neglects to have it read, or to inquire as to its contents. This well settled rule is based upon the sufficient reason that in such cases ignorance of the contents of instruments is attributable to the party’s own negligence. But the rule is otherwise where the execution of an instrument is obtained by a misrepresentation of its contents; where the party signed a paper he did not know he was signing, and did not really intend to sign It is immaterial, in the latter aspect of the case, t hat the party signing had an opportunity to read the paper, for he may have been prevented from doing so by the very fact that he trusted to the truth of the representation made by the other party with whom he was dealing. This is the clear-cut manner in which the Supreme Court of Alabama, in the case of Beck <v Pauli Lithographing Co. v. Houppert et al., reiterates the wholesome doctrine that a person cannot take advantage of his own wrong or negligence.