Passing Events

Passing Events

New Parcels Post rates went into effect August 15. Under the new arrangement, packages weighing twenty pounds may be mailed two hundred miles at the rate of five cents for the first pound and one cent for every additional pound. Local rates are reduced to one- half of previous rates.

Governor William Sulzer of New York was impeached in the early part of August by the legislative assembly for misappropriation of campaign funds and false statements. Lieutenant-Governor Martin H. Glynn was made governor, and for a time New York had two gov- ernors, Gov. Sulzer refusing to vacate, up to this writing, August 18.

Augustus O. Bacon, of Georgia, is the first United States Senator to be chosen at a state election held under the new amendment to the Constitution which provides for choosing senators by the direct vote of the people. He was chosen without opposition, to succeed himself, at a state election held July 15, at which the total vote polled was 10,000.

Dr. Robert Bridges has been appointed poet-laureate of England to succeed the late Alfred Austin, who acted since 1896, and who died June 2, 1913. Dr. Bridges was born in 1844. He graduated as a doctor of medicine at St. Bartholomew's College in London, and practiced his profession until 1882 when he retired. He has written several plays, a volume or two of short poems, and a number of critical essays on poets and the structure of poetry. While his verse has never been popular, it is admired by a small circle for its beauty of thought and perfection of form.

On railroad business the Bureau of Railway Economics reported for May that the railways of the United States received for their services to the public an average of $8,230,000 a day; to run their trains and for other expenses of operation it cost $5,920,000 a day. Their taxes were $341,500 a day; their operating income $1,972,322 a day, for the 220,897 miles of line reported, or at the rate of $8.93 for each mile of line for each day. All of these amounts are substantially greater than the similar returns for May, 1912. These reports include over 95% of the mileage and earnings of the railways of the country.

The United States Ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, returned to Washington, July 26, in response to an ordert from Presi- dent Wilson. He described the situation in Mexico to the President and the Secretary of State. He said Huerta had the situation fairly in hand, and rather favored the recognition of the Huerta government, but private reports indicated that almost every state was against Huerta, and that the federal government was on the verge of a downfall. As a result, the President named and sent ex-Governor John Lind of Min- nesota to Mexico as special envoy, and Ambassador Wilson resigned. Mr. Lind carried a special message from President Wilson to Huerta. Much bitterness against the United States is manifested by the Mex- ican people and press.

1166 IMPROVEMENT ERA

Elder Hyrum M. Smith, of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, was appointed on August 14, by the Church authorities, to preside over the European Mission, to succeed Elder Rudger Clawson, recently returned. Elder Smith is a son of President Joseph F. Smith, and became a member of the Council of Twelve Apostles on October 24, 1901. He filled a mission to Great Britain in 1895-98, and has been a constant and active worker in the Church. He is a member of the Boards of Y. M. M. I. A. and Religion Class, and is well known in the community as a man of strong character and purpose, and well versed in the matters of Church doctrine and government. He was born March 21, 1872, in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he attended the public schools, and later the Latter-day Saints College from which he grad- uated in 1894.

The Balkan situation appears to have come to a peaceful solution, a peace treaty having been agreed to recently. When Bulgaria found itself defeated in it's attempt to seize the lion's share of the spoils of the Turkish war, which ended by the London Peace treaty May 30, 1913, it sued for mercy. However, this appeal did not come until Roumania had joined the Servians, Montenegrins, Greeks, and Turks in attacking Bulgarian forces in a second war. When the Roumanian army was within easy reach of Sophia, and when Turkish troops had re-entered Adrianople, the Bulgarian cabinet, July 22, notified the Powers that they were ready to make peace, if Servia and Greece would consent. At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, August 10, the representatives of the five Balkan states signed a treaty of peace which, it is to be hoped, will be true to its name for years to come. If this is really the end of war in that district, it will be due more to the fact that all parties are exhausted by their internecine struggle, than to the provisions of the treaty, which are said to be neither founded on inherent justice nor satisfactory to the parties concerned. Bulgaria is completely at the mercy of her late allies, and besides has sacrificed the respect of the outside world by her avaricious desire to get the lion's share of the spoils of the Turkish war. The lives of thousands of people were needlessly sacrificed in the second war, as a result of which war there seemed to be nothing to prevent Servia and Greece from dividing up the disputed territory to suit themselves, except, of course, the veto of the greater European powers. It is interesting to note that Roumania rejected a plea of the United States, that the Balkan peace conference in the Bucharest treaty include a guarantee of religious freedom, proposed for the benefit' of the Jews inhabiting the territory to be ceded or annexed.

An invitation to Rev. Davidson to join the Latter-day Saints was

recently given by President Ben E. Rich of the Eastern States Mission. Rev. Davidson had become dissatisfied with his church, for reasons, perhaps similar to those that influenced the minister in The Calling of Dan Matthews, had burned his vestments and renounced his allegiance. Hence President Rich's invitation which appeared simultaneously in the New York Times, the Baltimore San, and other eastern papers, Mon- day, August 11. We quote from the San:

"New York. Aug. 11. — If the Rev. Charles Steele Davidson, of Charlottesville, Va., who renounced his allegiance to the Protestant Episcopal Church by burning his vestments and prayer book at the gates of Monticello, will apply at a mission house at 33 West One Hun- dred and Twenty-sixth street he will find a man waiting to welcome him into a new faith.

PASSING EVENTS 1167

"This man, who thinks he has the brand of religion the Rev. Mr. Davidson will like, is Ben E. Rich, president of the Eastern States Mission of the 'Mormon' Church.

"President Rich made the case of the Rev. Mr. Davidson the sub- ject of his sermon in the Harlem branch of the 'Mormon' Church yes- terday.

" 'It is very significant to me,' Mr. Rich said, 'that the Rev. Mr. Davidson burned his vestments after finding that the church to which he belonged was "spiritually dead." We have been accused of being about everything that is vile, but we have never been accused of being spiritually dead.

" 'They have often found that our organization was the "strongest organiaztion in the world outside of the German Army." Critics of our Church agree on this characterization. In fact, we might tell Mr. Davidson the secret of our Church's power. It is only that we are not spiritually dead. All that holds our organization together, in fact, is the spiritual enthusiasm of its membership.

" 'That is all there is to it. A Civil War general turned lecturer after the war, and he specialized on anti-"Mormon" and temperance lecturers. He preached against us a dozen years and then came upon some workmen of our faith who were erecting a monument to the first "Mormon" prophet, Joseph Smith, at his birthplace, in Sharon, Wind- sor county, Vt.

" 'The old soldier and anti-"Mormon" lecturer looked at the work- men, talked to them, learned of the lively glowing faith that kept them to their task, as it carried our pioneer caravans across the Great Amer- ican Desert. And finally he wrote a letter to a prominent officer of the Church declaring that while he hated and detested our religion, still he was forced to concede that it was a remarkable thing, in an age of general faithlessness in God, to find any creed so completely fanatical in its faith as ours was. We do believe in God with all our hearts, and we don't go half way with our belief.

"'If the Rev. Mr. Davidson should come with us he would find no special appointment awaiting him in a segregated clergy. And he would not find our poor held off in the back pews. He might find, should he join a "Mormon" ward, that his grocer was his bishop, while his woman servant was a prominent' official of the Woman's Relief Society. And he might find that the boy who delivered his groceries at his back door was an elder, and the farmer who brought in his green groceries was a high priest.

"In Sunday meetings he might be asked to speak just after the grocer boy had spoken in his capacity as an elder orthe farmer had officiated at the sacrament in his capacity as a high priest.

"'Should he take to our mission field, he would find a millionaire's son giving out tracts alongside the son of a poor grocer or butcher, and he would find the two preaching together in streetmeetings. He would find that all our missionaries, instead of being in service with the idea of making a career out of it, were yielding that time to the cause they have espoused. He would find that, while formerly work- ing in some store or field or industrial occupation^ they individually saved the money on which they entered the mission field and that each one expects to go back to the trade or employment he abandoned at the termination of his three years of service in the cause of his religion.

" 'So that ours is a religion to which everyone gives and in which all take that abiding joy that comes with service freely rendered. At our meetings here folks of every social estate mingle freely and alter-

1168 IMPROVEMENT ERA

nate one with another in doing the preaching. We have no paid clergy.

" 'We have no clerical class removed from the rest of us. That is why we were good Americans when we permitted an apostle to be- come a candidate for the United States Senate. Scored as we have been for this, we found a justification for it that other churches could not comprehend, since our Church organiaztion was so different.

" 'Had Senator Smoot been a chief official of any other church, he would have been set apart from the general community. He would have been graduated from a church school, ordained to the clergy, and a living would have been provided for him. He would have attained a great height in a calling to which he had dedicated his time and energies.

" 'Any lay member of our Church might have been summoned for the Church work Senator Smoot was called upon to do as an apostle. Every apostle in the Church has been so called, in fact. President Woodruff tended his farm and pitched his hay with his own hands after he became President, as he had done before. Apostle Woodruff, his son, could ride mountain ponies in a roundup with any cowboy on his ranch, and Brigham Young, Jr., an apostle, was as good a frontiersman almost as his father.

" ' So we can assure the Rev. Mr. Davidson a welcome among us into a spiritually alive organization in which there are no lines as to rich and poor or powerful and weak, and in which our charities are so attended to that no one knows about them and there is no parading of the beneficiaries before their luckier brothers and sisters. He may abhor the thought of coming with us right now, but it is because he has no doubt heard from our enemies about us. In proclaiming that the churches of his day are spiritually dead he proclaims what our first prophet taught us as the exact reason why he had been divinely appointed to restore in this age the exact Gospel as Christ taught it and established it on earth.' "

Elder Theodore Tobiason, a resident of Forest Dale, has been called to preside over the Swedish mission, and left for Stockholm on August 21, for his field of labor. Elder Tobiason was born in Malmo, Sweden, March 2, 1864. With his mother, he came to Utah in the fall of 1871. He was baptized September 23, 1873, by Elder Daniel H. Wells, and has proved a faithful member and worker in the Church, his present position being alternate high councilor in the Granite stake of Zion, to which office he was set apart in May, 1903, at which time he was ordained a high priest. He has heretofore filled two missions, one to the Northern States (1887-9), during which time he labored mostly in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana, and another to Sweden in 1895-7. In 1890 he was ordained a seventy. On October 2, 1885, he married Louisa B. Woolley, a daughter of Bishoo John M. Woolley, and has a family of eight children. His occupation has been varied, first engaging in farm work, and later in carpentering and contracting. He is a man of sterling integrity, full of the spirit of the gospel, and an enthusiastic and useful missionary.