A MURDER EVERY HOUR

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 185, 3 February 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

A MURDER EVERY HOUR

America is the most murderous nation in the world, says Collier's Weekly. This accusation is based on recently compiled statistics, which show" that murder is committed in the United States evenhour of the day and night'throughout the year. The murders in 1910 totalled, 8!)75, or !)8 per million of the population.' while the latest statistics show that the rate in Great Britain is less than !) per million.

There were only 104 executions following on last year's American murders, and Collier's Weekly lias compiled a table showing that for' anyone committing murder in the United States it is rather better than a 3 to 1 chance that he will never see the inside a prison—that is, that the trial will result cither in acquittal or in a sentence, like that of Thaw, or confinement in an asylum. As to execution, the chances are* 80 to 1 against. _ ~

CEMETERY OF 100,000 SOLDIERff/tfiSj PORT ARTHUR SEVEN YEARS AOTE&I9 THE SIEGE. , , -'j#B (By Richardson-L. Wright and BassotJ ,';"J|| Bare steep hills, gashed to the bone, 'S to the living rock. Huge drifts of .fjjg mangled steel and shattered concrete, ..-•?% Acre upon acre of hillside crushed to 'fipf road metal. 'hm Never a tree, never a bush. Valleys of »y death, here and there the crumbling j i/* foundations of house walls. Sparsely ' -.j grassed valleys, scarred and pock-mark- i ,>, ed at every few feet with bare, stony /■£! hollows. V -JT.

Port Arthur, seven years after the t nost terrible siege chronicled in history. ' -', In riiQßt instances of modern times, no ,"" Sooner has peace been declared betweea ■'' ,'( two combatants than steps have been \ jr taken to delete -the dreadful traces of ■', < v war. The soenes of fierce encounter* ••,' .[ and stubborn sieges of Alsace-Lorraine, in the Philippines and in South Africa hav* to-day 'little more than their artificial * y monuments to recall the past. :' has other ideas about Port £•'}; Arthur. ' :$. t'i Beyond clearing away the dead, tak- \*}, ing sanitary measures to purify the ,' £ ! battlefields and shattered forts of ihg /,-% district, and occupying, the strategical '- r £ positions at either lip.of the harbor -{.]': mouth, she has done nothing to obiter- C;'.*> ate the grim traces of the price she hag' -"';W had to pay for her victory. ' % LESSON OF THE WAR. _ ' '%

Italics of the fray lie on every hand — "«, ■_'. great steel gun carriages, torn like difj- /'.'• carded sardine tins; guns with burst 'i • breeches or jaggedly rent at the tip of J their muzzles; shells and projectiles'of \'' every size and in every stage''or crumplement, v an unpleasant proportion,, .too, ''*- %', half-buried and unexploded, though' a re- .\ ward stands for the Chinese peasants who " '•' report their location; rusted bayonets,' s •_ battered leaden and nickle bullets, brok-. /"■ '. > en rifle stocks, twisted leathern boot V • soles, metal regimental badges, snapped ''• v sword-blades and the hilts of what were r - ' sabres. ~., . _

And bleaching bones, with here and there a grinning skull.. Port Arthur seven years after the .?■ ' siege jn which perished a tenth of * njjl- ', ■ \ lion men, is to-day undoubtedly the inost >- ■ menacing lesson 1 of the horrors of high-' *;-) explosive warfare that exists on the face of the earth. V

One's first and perhaps one's most' , *■ striking, impression of the spot—always .' : ' excepting a vivid consciousness of the , littered, smashed countryside—is 'the narrowness of the mouth of the long/, spacious lagoon on a land-locked harbor,' -v That gap of a couple of "hundred yards; l " ~ .- of placid, deep blue water between tqw;. ,-,"' ering Golden Hill and the low,- ;' ing ridge of Tiger's Tail Promontory' -*-, seems so quiet and insignificant, if pic- ;'.. turesque, a corner of lonely Asiatic coastline to have been for most of the yeas 1904 the principal local point of interest for all the civilised peoples—the lock ' whose forcing would deprive Russia of her dream of a warm-water Pacific out- i let from January to December. Port Arthur is a seaport, but you cannot get witin some distance of the sea for miles each side of the harbor, so intent are the Japanese on preserving absolute secrecy about the extensive coastline" fortifica-

tions they are piling along the flanks of their naval baße.

FALLEN HEROES. The Japanese ha,ve only just completed the clearing of the fairway, the raising : ; of the ships to sink which, and bottle up the fleet of Russia' cowering behind Tiger's Tail Promontory,- Junior Captain Hirose rushed in under the outpouring of all hell and perished in the successful accomplishment of his blockade. Neither pen nor camera can depict the ' scene to-day at Tungchikuanshun, the ' "'' celebrated North Forth, in the burrowing arcade of which fell the gallant General Kondrachenko. It was here that the Japanese laboriously dug tunnels,charged them with - 23001bs of powder, and with these gigantic mines blew the forts to bits, killing or wounding every ; one. of the little garrison of 320. There had been earlier mine operations, in the fort, both sides tunnelling. The Japanese sappers had lttigths of cord tied to their ankles, and asked their comrades to pull back their corpses when the Rus■sian mine should be exploded. They ' knew what would be their end, and, sure 1 . enough, it came on October 27. All were killed.

Two miles inland from, the harbor 203 Metre Hill rears its gaunt head high above the encircling.heights. Our rickshaw coolies brought us up. the winding granite ribbon ofi road, away from the little town,, past the last mud-walled Chinese 'farmlet, into a region of shellswept desolation. V(e left them and toiled up the littered, zig-zag trenches that creep toward the twin summits.

PRICE" OF VICTORY. Ton upon ton of mangled corpses did the combatants bear away jn those dark days of 1904, but so thoroughly did the shell-fire churn up the ground that many skeletons remained imbedded in- the soil, ' , till the rain erosion of the passing years should expose them. Here and there a skull, now a piece of shattered human hip-bone, now a cluster: of femurs and tibiae, many fragments of exploded shell,' brass cartridge-cases and the cartridge sockets of automatic quick-firing rifles, •and warped and twisted fragments of boots.

It was a bleak, sunless day. Half-way up the hillside—.so steep one could only just scramble up it—we came into low clouds of woolly sea-fog, driving inland from the Gulf of Pechili. A hundred feet higher, and every sound from the town j in the valley'below had hushed out of hearing. An oppressive, utter stillness—how striking a contrast with the thundering, death-belching inferno seven years agolay over shrouded 203 Metre Hill. Higher and higher. Something loomed out of the fog ahead. A torn gun-carriage, resting on a pile of road-metal-, shell-pulver- - ised ironstone. A little further, :the summit.

On the northern slope, a glimpse gij;en as a rift blew into thn'scudding clouds, showed thousands .upon ..thousands,,..of tons of blasted, jagged,- waist-high- boulders of rock, not a "blade of green stuff sprouting among them., The "scene of the death agonies of tens of thousands of men and the loss of the Russian landward gateway to Port Arthur.