LOCAL AND GENERAL.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 4, 6 January 1915, Page 6

LOCAL AND GENERAL.

Weather Forecast.— Westerly moderate to <ai o ng witods with a southerly tendeu.-y. The svoulKr wi'l probahly prove squally and changeable with passing The barometer has a rising tendency, but is unsteady.—Pemberton, Wellington.

Thp balance-sheet of the West Australian State meat shops, which MiBath, late Minister for Lands, declared was making a handsome profit, has passed throug lithe Auditor-General's hands. It shows that the three shops at Perth, Freniantle, and Subi made, during the financial year, a profit of £l6 10s 3d, while the cattle shipments to supply them made a loss of £2773. The total loss on the State meat supply enterprise on June 30th last was £3571.

The oldest living journal in America —older even than the London Timeslias just celebrated its 150th anniversary. It was started on October 22nd, 1764, under the name of the Connecticut Courant, which, in 1845, was changed to the Hartford Courant, the title under which it is now issued. There was, for instance,.as The Times reminds us, the earliest of all—PuS?ic Occurrences, of Boston, which ."never got beyond Vol. I No. 1. .It contained a promise to publish the names Of all the liars in Boston in its second issue, and the authorities forbade the publication"—perhaps because the authorities themselves would have figured in the list.

The amount to the credit of depositors in the State Savings Banks of all the States in Australia combined has reached the vast su mof £80,533,726. The total three years ago was approxu mately £67,000,000, so that the increase accumulated during the three years has been nearly £14,000,000. The figures for the month of November show that this progress 1 still continues as the total amount deposited during the month was £4,347,640. The withdrawals totalled £3,979,057, leaving aii excess of deposits of £368,583 for the month: These figures show that the competition of the Commonwealth Bank, which opened its savings bank branch in 1912, has not interfered with the remarkable growth of the State Savings Banks throughout' Australia.

I . "Extraordinary interest, was taken by the civil population of Brussels in The Times, and its war news, stated a .correspondent , who recently reached London after spending some weelfs in .the Belgian capital. < "Single copies of the paper fetched as much as £7 and £9; and quite a remarkable business was done in duplicated typewritten copies of the war news in The Times—especially that relating to the operations in Belgium l . These copies, like the paper itself j had' to be sold and circulated surreptitiously.' But the daring men who carried on the trade, like, their customers, readily risked German vengeance, and made a good thing out of the enterprise; the typed copies of war messages selling for £1 each,- and sometimes as" much as £2. They had their customers in saes and other places,, who smuggled <*i way the precious sheets to read with furtive delight 'in secret places."

There is one Emdon episode which adds to the big record against the Ger-. man name. By the destruction of the Clan Grant, Captain Muller robbed the world of a unique collection belonging to Professor Patrick Geddes, the protagonist of town planning. It will be recalled that, the first town planning exhibition took place in Burlington House at the instance of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Its most- outstanding feature and mast magnetic exhibit was that sent by Professor Geddes, to' show the evolution of a modern city as demonstrated by Edinburgh the romantic. After the collection had been shown at Crosby Hall, it took on itself a. peripatetic mission, and visited in turn Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin. The year 19113 saw it in the big Ghent Exposition, and' early this year it was shown in Lyons.' Professor Geddes is at present in India, whither he had gone to lend his services to the laying out of the new capital at Delhi, and. so advices from London say, his precious collection perished en route in the Clan Grant. Some duplicates are being sent to the professor, but there are numbers of irrplaceable old engravings, maps, and plans of Continental towns with histories reaching back to the time before Christ. Even later ones are now very rare, such as those depicting the London of before the great fire, the nobly-planned metropolis which Sir Christopher Wren set forth to take its place, plans made abortive, as lias so often happened in the history of great towns, by later utilitarian notions of