Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 August 1898 — Topics Of The Times [ARTICLE]

Topics Of The Times

Thomas Monohan, who murdered two men in New Hampshire while drunk, has been sentenced to serve twentyfour years at hard labor In the State prison for each crime. The sentences are to be successive, making forty-eight years in all. It is stated that Turkey lost less than 1,000 men in battle in the Greek war, but 19,000 died in Thessaly of disease, and 22,000 were sent home invalided, and of the latter 8,000 subsequently died. Among the dead were seventeen army surgeons. A physician who has been studying the effect of liquors on the voice states that none of the great singers has ever been teetotalers. Wine, taken in moderation, he believes, is useful for the voice, but beer thickens it and makes It guttural. Veneer cutting has reached such perfection that a single elephant’s tusk thirty inches long is cut in London into a sheet of ivory 150 Inches long and twenty inches wide, and some sheets of rosewood and mahogany are only about a fiftieth of an inch thick. A shrewd shopman on Broadway, New York, has placed genuine thirteeninch, twelve-inch and eight-inch shells and six and one-pound shot' in his big window. The huge messengers of death and destruction draw crowds of “rubbernecks” from the bulletin boards. Of course the shells are not loaded. Somebody calling himself a traveler writes to a paper in Portland, Me., protesting against the present dilapidated condition of Henry W. Longfellow’s birthplace, and recommending that the city purchase it, repair it and make a Longfellow museum of It. It is now a tenement house and bears a tablet with a vainglorious inscription saying that in it Longfellow was born. The railway from the Congo River’s mouth to Stanley pool, 240 miles in length, has finally been completed, after eight years ’work, and a vast area of the Interior of Africa has thus been opened to modern methods of trade and commerce. There are 10,000 miles of navigable waterway above Stanley pool, and 20,000,000 people inhabit the territory which may be thus reached. Large portions of the old royal castle in Berlin are to be remodeled to make it habitable, ihe Emperor’s desire is to be able to offer a comfortable abode to his guests on great festival occasions, who have previously been quartered in various Berlin hotels at great expense to the imperial exchequer. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars have already been expended in altering and repairing the old castle. S. G. Thurlow, of Belfast, Me., now nearly 90 years old, has just received permission to remove from the custom house there a desk which he bought and put there for his personal use when he was collector of the port thirty years ago. It had got on the inventory of office furniture through some mistake, and when his term expired he was not allowed to remove it. Application after application for permission to do so failed until now. The Atlanta conference for the study of “the negro problem” is this year to consider the efforts of the negroes themselves to better their condition. Among these efforts are the relief work by secret societies, the work of charitable and philanthropic associations and co-operative businesses in which negroes engage. Some time also will be devoted to health statistics and the various Government reports bearing upon the negro.