Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 63, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 April 1907 — FROM FOREIGN LANDS [ARTICLE]

FROM FOREIGN LANDS

What was said to be one of the greatest ratepayers’ demonstrations seen in London in many years occurred recently when several thousands marched through the streets to Trafalgar square, where a mass meeting was held to protest against further municipal ownership experiments on the part of the London county council. The procession, which was more than a mile in length, included many unique features intended to cast discredit upon tha municipal industries, among these being fifty large gramophones which emitted bitter comments upon "wastrels.” The meeting adopted a resolution stating that “This mass meeting of London ratepayers indignantly protests against the increasing burden of rates, caused by the pro-, gressive socialist party, and pledges itself to exert every effort to turn tbe wastrels out on March 2, and place In power the party of municipal reform,” Prime Minister Sir Henry CampbellBannerman contributes to the Nation, the liberal weekly, an article on The Hague conference, in which he refutes the objections to raising the question of limitation of armaments, contending that nothing has occurred since 1898 to render inopportune orjuischlevoua the reduction of armaments which was then recognized as desirable. On the contrary, he says, the passage of years has only served to strengthen the impression of 1898 that the endless multiplication of engines of war is futile and self-defeating, and that what was then a suspicion, that no limit could be set to the struggle for sea [lower save by the process of economic exhaustion, has now become something like a certainty. He asserts that Great Britain has already given nn earnest of her sincerity by reducing her naval and military expenditures, aud by undertaking to go further if a similar deposition it shown elsewhere. ...

Paris bad jthe news Tuesday that a French column under Gen. Liautey had occupied the nerve center of Morocco, Oudja, a walled city near tlip frontier where caravans arrive from the desert. Foreign Minister Pichoh. in explaining |he move to the French chamber, said tlmi the Moors had become more and more insolent, until something had to be done. Claims for damages had been long neglected, and the Sultan had to be taught a lesson. It was a matter for Franca alone, and Germany appeared do be giving tar a free band. This w ; as to be only the flm of a series of punitive acts by Franca.