AUSTRALIAN NEWS

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 5, 7 January 1916, Page 3

AUSTRALIAN NEWS

FEDERAL FINANCES.

MELBOURNE, Jan. 5

The Federal Customs revenue -for the six months totalled £7.969,983, an increase of £358,481. Post Office revemio increased £131,221. Old-age pensioners at the end of the year totalled, 91,904, and invalid pensioners 21,757. ar pensions so' far granted carry-an annual liability of £90,170. The Federal note issue is £41,766,122, against which the Treasury hold gold to the value of £14,965,317.

A warning against the danger of nagging at the country’s leaders was uttered by the Archbishop of York at Bristol recently. What body of men could have undertaken a task so unexpected and difficulties so a , enormous

without making a good many mistakes? he asked. At any rate, it was only the Government the nation could command. There was no husband who did not know that for moral improvement nagging was the most fateful thing in the world. They would do no good either to the Government or to the country or to the sacred -cause for which we were fighting if they indulged in this fatal spirit of nagging at their leaders.

The latest complaint to get a name of its own in this war of surgical surprises is “trench back.” Many cases are under treatment at the Kitchener Indian Hospital, Brighton. They come almost invariably from the trenches (says Captain Sandes, writing in the British Medical Journal). Usually the injury is caused by sandbags' or masses of earth hurled on the men’s backs by bursting shells. Some patients have been so seriously injured that they have had to be carried on stretchers; in milder cases the symptoms are very like those of lumbago—the patient suffers severe pain, and is unable to stand upright. Fp*t innately a rapid and effective cure has been found in ionisation with sodium salicylate, which is a method by which the drug is made to penetrate the skin by the agency of an electric current. Uiider this treatment, carried out in the electro-thera-peutic apartment of the Kitchener hospital, quite helples S ' men have recovered after a short course of treatment .