Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1897 — No Soft Prinks. [ARTICLE]

No Soft Prinks.

“Can’t give you nothing but straight whisky, friend,” said the barkeeper to the Klondiker. “All the soft drinks is froze hard.”—lndianapolis Journal. The white rhinoceros is nearly extinct. London has two stuffed specimens and another is in the Cape Town Museum. In St. Louis there Is enough vacant and unused land to make a strip 123 feet wide and nearly 900 miles long.

American manufactures continue to be popular abroad despite the assertion that protection would make them unpopular. The London Economist, of recent date, says that England is becoming a large purchaser of American manufactures, especially in iron and steel " lines, and that English manufactures must cheapen their cost of production if they are to hold their ground against the American competitor. The persistency with which Great Britain maintains her freetrade notions is causing the ruin of some of her colonial possessions. Her West Indian possessions are rich and fertile tracts, but they are mainly dependent upon their sugar crop for support, and now that the beet-sugar industry has risen to such proportions in Europe, they cannot successfully compete in the markets to which they have heretofore shipped the products of their cane. Germany has paid an export bounty on her beet sugar so that it has come into ruinous competition with the West Indian cane product. A moderate duty on beet sugar by England would give the West Indies access to that market, and, although it is clearly understood by the British that these colonies are bankrupt and on the verge of absolute ruin, no Englishman will raise his voice in favor of a slight relaxation of the free-trade idea.

It is stated, on as good authority as the New York Independent, that seven young men have been killed by foot ball this season, and many others injured, but another authority perlmps just as correct says only 11 have been killed by the game in 5 years. But 7 in one year or 11 in 5 years are either strong arguments in favor of suppressing the game. At the same time, however, it should be remembered that two or three hundred people are drowned every year, while swimming, and now while the hunting season is on, not a day passes that some one is not killed while engaged in that amusement. Nine were killed the first week of the deer season in Northern Michigan alone, it is stated. How many are killed and marred each year by bicycling, heaven only knows. All of which suggests the idea that if sports dangerous to life and limb are to be suppressed by law and public opinion, then there are several that should be abolished before foot ball is reached.