Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/548

 Rh CURRENT EVENTS.

GREAT credit and honor should be given the Czar Nicolas II tor the many reforms he is starting in Russia. In the future there will be no banishment to Siberia, the offenders will be imprisoned in Russia, and large institutions are about to be erected to serve this end. The Czar has canceled his father's order which decreed that every non-Orthodox person who married an Orthodox person should sign a document declaring that the children of such a union would be baptized and educated in the Orthodox faith. Even more important has been the removal of the restric tions against the Roman Catholic faith in the prov ince of Poland; the Catholics are now as free to practice their religion as the Orthodox. Through a special ukase Nicolas II abolished the ten percent tax on rents. The next ordinance was to restore mu nicipal government to those Polish towns which had been deprived of it after 1863. He also decreed the establishment of a Zemstor or county councils, a favor so many times asked for by the people. The censor of the Polish press has been even more arbitrary than the censor at St. Petersburg, but the governor gen eral, with the permission of the Czar, has reversed these circumstances and the Polish press enjoys greater freedom than the rest of Russia. M. Sienkiewicz, the author of " Quo Vadi.s," and thegreatest living Polish writer, has been made censor of plays at Warsaw, taking the place of a man who did not even understand the Polish language. Many other favors have been shown the Polish people, and it is no won der that when the Czar visited Poland he was greeted by an outburst of enthusiasm such as had never before greeted any Russian czar.

THE police commissioners of Boston have issued a decree that henceforth every itinerant street musician must pay a license fee, wear his number on his cap, and move 300 feet away whenever he is requested to do so. THE works established by the municipality of Shoreditch, London, are designed to destroy the local refuse, generate electric light and supplv hot water to the public baths and laundries. Carts will convey the street trade and household refuse to the works, which will consume yearly 20,000 tons of refuse, hitherto carried to barges and dumped into the sea at great expense. Л WRITING pen provided with a small electric lamp has lately been patented in Austria. By this device it is said that the paper in front of the writer is kept

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well lighted, the disagreeable shadow of the pen being entirely done away with.

THE Bank of England contains silver ingots which have lain in its vaults since 1696.

NIAGARA FALLS is reckoned to do as much work as 226,000,000 tons of coal could do in a year.

THE Chilian government has decided to appro priate five hundred thousand dollars for encouraging the development of iron and steel foundries in that country. A hundred and twenty thousand is to be given to an American syndicate as a bonus for estab lishing an iron factory. The residue of the sum will be similarly distributed.

THE council of Toledo, Ohio, has, at the sugges tion of the mayor, decided to do away with the sys tem of giving contracts for public work. Labor in the direct employ of the city is to be used in street paving and in the disposition of garbage. The selec tion of the employees for the city will be by civil service rules. SOME interesting correspondence, recently pub lished, between the British Iron Trade Association and the Board of Trade, reveals the fact that the Board of Trade is arranging, with the aid and consent of the British government, to take active measures to counteract the efforts of manufacturers of the United States to secure a place in South American markets. A " colonial intelligence committee " has been appointed to disseminate information gathered by consuls and agents, and a commission has been appointed to travel in Central and South America and report upon trade conditions.

WHEN so many papers are entering into the dis cussion of why more men do not marry, it is interest ing to know that by the census of 1890 there are a million and a half more men than women in America, the only trouble being that the women are not prop erly distributed. In the East there is an excess of 184,000 women, while in the West there is agréât scarcity, California leading the list with nearly a 200,000 deficiency of the gentler sex. In the far West women are appreciated and in- great demand, and if a couple of hundred thousand of the Eastern women would go West, the problem of why more men do not marry would be easily settled.