NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1056, 13 June 1912, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES.

Taumatawhakatangihangahoanau is the name of a Maori block of land, part of which is now open for selection under the Government’s optional system at Porangahau.

No fewer than seven millionaires went down with the Titanic, and the approximate extent of the wealth of these millionaires is as follows : Colonel Astor £30,000,000. Mr B. Guggenheim ,£19,000,000, Mr T. Strauss £10,000,000, Mr G. D. Widener £10,000,000, Colonel W. Roebling £5,000,000, Mr J. 3. Thayer £2,000.000. Mr Jonkhur is another reputed millionaire, but the amount of his fortune is unknown.

The other day a man strolling leisurely down Princess street, Dunedin, stood amazed to see a figure asprawl in the gutter near Wilkie’s, with one arm apparently twisted under his body, the head unnaturally contorted, and the legs forming an inverted V. The amazed one’s diagnosis of the case was followed by prompt action. Seizing the figure round the middle, he lifted it clear from the ground. A red face was turned over the shoulder, and an aggrieved voice said: “What are you lifting me tor? You’re the second fool that’s done that.” It was an official turning off an unwilling tap, and the stroller hastily resumed his pipe and an air creditably unconcerned.

The following; is an extract from a working man’s letter from Waihi to a friend at the Bluff : “A lot of the very best men have left Waihi. Socialism has ruined the place. Socialists have been trying to run the, place and domineer everybody in it, and they have been let go too lar without being checked. But the people are beginning to wake up, and I think the socialists will have to go under. It would be a nice state of affairs if we were to be ruled by Alhiests, Anarchists, Communists, Aguostics, and all the villainy that hell is heir to. It’s time they were put down.”

Mr Allan Moody raised the point of when a man is ‘‘drunk and disorderly,” at the Auckland Police Court, and Mr Cutteu, S.M., staled that when a man takes drink it causes him to depart from the normal. If it took sufficiently from the normal to affect his limbs and make him a passive nuisance, he was arrested tor being “drunk.,” If, instead, it affected him mentally, so that he became an active nuisance, he was liable to arrest for being “drunk and disorderly.” Mere exuberance of animal spirits, without the added impulse of the other spirits, might constitute disorderliuess. The police rule was that when a man becomes a nuisance they might interfere.

“We are living in the midst of a revolution as true and as deep as the French Revolution of the eighteenth century,” declared Professor Wilson, in a lecture in Sydney last week. He said that it was an age of phenomena which most of us only half understood, and many did not understand at all. Class consciousness in the worse sense was sure to eventuate unless we made a more serious effort to understand one another. One of the distressing conditions of this time was the suspicion and distrust with which certain of the more cultivated and richer classes were regarded by the poorer classes.

American farmers are ploughing with dynamite now to such an extent that one manufacturer of explosives sold to farmers 500,000 pounds in 190 S, 750,000 pounds in 1909, 1,500,000 pounds in 1910, 3,000,000 pounds in 1911, and the indications are that this one concern will ship 5,000,0q0 pounds to farmers this year. This method of ploughing was the idea of a Southern farmer, who found that it loosened up the, subsoil as no ordinary method of cultivation could do. The results were astonishing in the increased size ot hip crops, and so out of proportion to the cost of the dynamite, that it rapidly became popular. There are to-day fully half-a-dozen powder manufacturers who are devoting themselves especially to the sale ot high explosives for cultivjitiug the ground.