People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 March 1895 — Notes and Comments. [ARTICLE]

Notes and Comments.

The city of Glasgow, Scotland, purchased the gas plant of that city from a corporation twenty-five years ago at a cost of $3,000,000. The municipal management gives entire satisfaction The private corporation charged $1.14 per 1,000 feet; the city charges 60 cents. The quantity of gas consumed has increased over 175 per cent Object les sons of this kind along the lines oi "fraternalism” knocks the stuffin’ put of corporate "infernajism,”

According to the census reports over one-half the families of this country are living in rented homes—s2.2o per cent, to be exact, while 27.97 per cent of the owning families have mortgages on their homes. Here we have more than one-half the people without a country, and yet if the country was involved in a foreign war these homeless people would be expected to do the fighting. Queer country, this. * ■> * Common sense would seem to lead the wiseacres and savans to see in the popular discontent and restlessness evidences of a smoldering revolution, and that the old isues are worn out — that old political ties no longer bind as once they did. ♦ ♦ * The democratic party seems to have lost all clues that would lead to the discovery of prosperity and have about abandoned the search. In the light of this party’s most signal failure where is the intelligent democrat that can assign a single reason for that party’s pretended existence? « • * Glasgow, Scotland, owns its oiwn water works. The system has been gradually duplicated, and in the course of a year the capacity will be 1,000,00 C! gallons a day, sufficient for a populn-I tion of 2,000,000. The old company charged 14 pence of rental value, while the city’s charge is 6 pence, and at this rate the income last year was 1800,000 and the expenditure was $600,000, yielding a net revenue of $200,000 This is called “paternalism” in thicountry by a class of people who sustain corporate infernallsm. * ♦ * The war between labor and capita' will continue to be waged so long as present conditions remain—labor demanding better pay for work, and capital wanting more work for less pay Strikes will continue, but these wil' not bring relief until labor makes a grand strike at the ballot box. One grand united strike on that line wil’ settle the question at once and for al time. * • * Are you surprised at the great number of train and bank robberies, holdups, burglaries, the*ts and crimes generally reported daily in the papers': You ought not to be when you properly consider conditions that environ men to-day in this country. When k is admitted that there are 3,000,000 men in enforced idleness, it must also be admitted that not all of these men will starve in the midet of plenty, and that some of them are bound to become criminals. Last year there were 9,800 murders in this country against 6,615 for 1893, or an increase of over 30 per cent. The record for suicides for 1894 is higher than any previous year, the number being 4,912, nearly one-half of which were due to despondency. The destruction of life from suicides and murders amounted for the year 1894 to 14,712, making the record the darkest in history. * ♦ <■ A traveler tells how he sent a telegraphic message of twenty-six words from Algiers, in Africa, to Dijon, France, 50i| miles by cable and SCO miles by overland wire, for only 52 cents, or only one cent a word. Both of these lines were public property and that explains it. We could easily have as cheap rates in this countiy if the people would quit bending the supple knee to corporate power.

Machinery is rapidly driving men out of employment, and the question arises, where will we as a people bring up in a few years? The reaper of today does the work of nearly one hundred men fifty years ago. Typesetting machines do in one day what it would take six or seven printers to do in the same time, and so all through every department of labor. Does it ever occur to those who treat with lofty contempt every, proposition for reform that there must eventually be a radical change In social conditions to conform to the constantly broadening of the field of inventions? • * * A short time ago a horse was killed on a trestle near Spring Valley, 111., by a train. The starving people In the vicinity seized the dead animal, cooked and ate it. At Peoria, 1)1,, a man stole a sack of flour a few weeks ago, took it home, and without waiting to cook it, the starving family surrounded the sack and ate the dry flour. Scenes of a similar character are reported in all sections of the country, but how long will the people endure conditions ot this character? That’s the question. ♦ ♦ * It Is said that George Gould has exI pended several hundred thousand doli lars in the effort to break into the j charmed circle of English aristocracy, i while a brother-in-law with a French | title, cost, over $3,000,000. I