Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 September 1895 — NOTES AND COMMENTS. [ARTICLE]

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The State censuses of 1885 nearly all indicate a movement from the cities back to the farms.' The new woman is booming in Oklahoma. More than twenty are in the jails there charged with beiar bandits. Permission to establish a steamboat service on the Dead sea has been asked of the Sultan of Turkey by the provincial authorities of Syria. Andrew Carnegie has aroused British wrath by saying that it would pay England to burn up her railroad equipment and replace it with American models. • It is said that if England were to become a republic to-morrow, ami there were a popular election for President, the Prince of Wales would be sure to receive a majority of all the votes in the United Kingdom. Another learned man has been studying the • ‘language" of insects. He says he has discovered satisfactory evidence of telepathy among them Telepathy is described as a sixth sense, by which tiie insects are able to communicate ideas to one another at a great distance. The aggregate number of employes of all tiie roads in the United States is as large as the standing army in Germany. The 1,890 railroads in this country employ IXIO,OOO persons; that makes one person in every ninety in our population depend for his living on a railroad. Corn is not the only product which is breaking all record*. The iron output these days is the largest which the country Ims ever had at this lime of the year. Moreover, it is steadily growing. This is one of the most striking evidences which could be found that a period of business activity exceeding auv which tin- country has yet known is close at hand. The latest census of Berlin shows that tho population is nearly stationary. It appears to bo hopeless for Berlin to overtake Paris, which is now 800,000 ahead. Vienna is pressing Berlin closely, while St. Petersburg progresses rapidly than the German capital. In Berlin there are now more than forty-live thousand apartments without tenants. Its latest census gives Boston only 494.000 people, and leaves it still behind St. Louis in population, hut the suburban population of St. Louis i* small. Within a few miles of most Western cities it is possible to Hail the primitive wilderness, while Eastern cities have suburbs often nearly as heavily populated an the city Itself. Thus with its suburbs Boston now claims a population of I)*1,000. Herr Haoknhkcit, as Hamburg, the animal collector and trainer, urges that some practical steps he taken to protect the elephants of Africa, which, he asserts, are threatened with total extermination, lie proposes that the exportation of tusks weighing less than twenty-two pounds should t>e prohibited by (aw, and that hunters be forbidden to kill females and young bulls, hut rather encouraged to capture them alive and bring them into the trading stations. According to the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, .the shoe manitfaelurera of Austria and Germany have been compelled to raise the price of shoes thirty per cent, on account of tiie dearth of leather, caused by the exportation of tin incase quantities of it to the United HlUet. The demand in the United Btat.es is by some supposed to be due to vast exportation of skins and leather to Japan and China; others consider it fictitious. The bank of England rightly has the reputution of being one of the mightiest powers In the world of finance. But there are other Institutions in Europe whose capital and transactions are not to be sneezed at even by the Rothschild aggregation. In its last monthly report the Austrc-Uungariiiii Bank, at Vienna, states that Hie value it its notes In circulation is 1529,408,000 gulden ($260,000,000), and that it has gold and silver to the amount of 040,405,000 gulden. The English elections in 1894 cost $5,220,000, u comparatively small amount of money, but in 1880, 1886 and 1802 the figures were much larger, being respectively, $9,000,000, $10,000,000 and $15,000,000. The cost of the last election will reach $16,000,000 at least, which means that each vole is worth SB. Truly the legislative functions are gratuitous in England, and corruption iH unknown, according to the English press.

A statistical work about the world’s millionaires lias just been published While there are richer individuals in America, it says, most millionaires are to be foqnd in Great Britain. But the figures must be taken as guesswork, mom or less. This is how the people possessing $5,000,000, or more, are divided among the notions: Great Uritaiu, 200; United States, 100; Germany and Austria, 100; France, 75; Russia, 50; India, 00; ail other countries, 125. A wooden leg, if stood upon, is not dutiable, according to a recent :iecision of the Treasury Department. To be admitted without the customs tax it must be attached to the body of the owner. False teeth ill the mouth, wigs on the lieud, false eyes in their sockets, arc, under the same ruling, also exempt from duty. The false leg that docs not support the owner must bear its part of the support of the Government. Thus the imported leg must do its duty or pay it. When the change from horse cars to the trolley curs was made in Massachusetts hundreds of stablemen lost tbcir work and wages, and the conclusion was that the chance to work bad gone. The facts show, on the contrary, that 4,103 workmen were employed on Massachusetts street cars under the old system, and that under the new system 7,451 are employed, a considerable part of the increase being employed in constructing 2,000 extra cars, needed to carry the 220,464,099 passengers, instead of the 100,746,786 passengers who used the street cars of the old system. The discoveries incident to the uncovering of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii have been recently paralleled in Turkestan in Central Asia, where an underground city has jost been discovered. The archaeological importance of such relics of the past is more widely understood now than it was when the Pompeiian discovery startled the world. There will, undoubtedly, be a duly authorized commission organised by the Russian Government to establish the authenticity of this subterranean city and record the statistics of its whilom civilization. Archaeology has in time past and in certain other “discoveries" that have been claimed taken many doubtful chances; but no peril of this kind need be feared from s® conservative and experienced a government as that of Russia. Thebe are twenty lavyns on one street in New York, each of which is worth $1.000 ,000. I)r. Webb has paid $3,000,000 for his residence in New York. J. J. Astor has giveu $1,000,000 in jewelry to hts wife. iJiss G. Vanderbilt received

$85,000 worth of bouquets from nabobs at her recent * ‘coming-out” party. Ex-Sec-retary Whitney, who would like to be I president, has a ballroom in his honse the panus of which cost $5,000 each. ! Pianos costing as high as $15,000 are common among the nabobs. At a recent j opera the women’s jewels aggregated j $1,385,000. Cornelius Vanderbilt has gates from France, stone from the west, a gardener from Berlin aod plants from Italy. At the Burden-81oane wedding there were 150 millionaires, with the aggregate pile of $1,000,000,000. German educational methods and manners are becoming more and more the models for the world. To the German universities, in constantly increasing numbers, flock the representatives of education from every clime and country. In the twenty two German universities (including the Academy at Munster and the Lyceum at Braunsberg) in the year 1886-’ 87 tiie total attendance was 28,045; in the year 1891-92 it was 21.480. In the firstnamed year the total iuclnded 15,712 Prussians. 10,551 other Germans, and 1.683 foreigners; in the second year tiie j figures were, 14,282 Prussians, 11,440 oilier Germans, and 1,814 foreigners. Of these 1.814 strangers, 291 were from Anstro-1 lungary. 102 from Turkey and tiie Balkan countries, 351 from Russia, 24 from Sweden, Norway and Deumark, 43 from the Netherlands, 39 from Belgium and Luxemburg, 138 from Great Britain and Trelaud, 27 from France, 6 from Spain and Portugal, 238 from Switzerland, 20 from Italy, 361 from the United Slates, 32 from other American countries, 06 from Asia. 0 from Africa, and 6 from Australia. Arranged according to faculties, these 1,814 foreigners were distributed as follows: 147 students of Protestant theology, 14 of Roman Catholic theology, 233 of law, 440 of medicine, 984 in the philosophical department.