Morning journal and courier., 1880-06-17

MT. Schick, who holds the office of Sur veyor of Buildings in Jerusalem, has lately I issued report which shows that wonderful change has taken place in the holy city in I late years. Ruined houses have been re- | stored or rebuilt by individuals or companies, and buildings on the Peabody plan have been ! erected by associations. The streets are now 1 lighted, kept for an Eastern city, most ex- ceptionally clean, and the aqueduct from the Pools of Solomon has been restored, and water brought thence to the city. Tanner | ies and slaughter houses have been removed I outside the town. The Sanitary Department { is under the control of German physician Bethlehem and Nazareth are also eagerly em | ulating the progress of the capital.
 John Bright, who presided at the recent I annual public debate of the University Col lege Debating Society of London, had some thing to say on the question, which was, Should capital punishment be abolished ?" He spoke as follows ''It seems to me that the infiction of capital punishment-putting men to death for committing certain offences is policy as unchristian as it is unphilo- sophical- policy that is likely to fail, and, so far as I am able to judge of the experience of other countries, has entirely failed, so long and so far as it has been persisted in. Now, it appears to me that to teach people the sacredness of human life, which is after all great safeguard for human life, there can be no plan more opposed to success than that of the ordinary and frequent sacrifice of human life by the law. If it is expected that people are to reverence human life, the country and it's laws should also reverence it as much, and the one will depend very much upon the other. I believe that however much law and punishment may deter
 and make life safe, the reverence which is
 implanted in the mind in favor of human
 life is infinitely more powerful as safeguard
 than any, even the severest, punishments that
 the law infiict. When that punishment is
 one which shows that human life may, under
 certain circumstances, be treated in a barbs-
 rous, savage and degrading manner, it
 tends to undermine and upset that great rev
 erence for human life which is among men of
 all civilized and great countries the principal safeguard of it. That is a view which have
 long held and I am firmly convinced that
 the punishment of death has not in itself, as
 rule, been favorable to the reverence for
 and the security of human life" The stu
 dents voted by large majority that capital
 punishment should be abolished
 Since the Narragansett disaster there has
 been much talk about the electric light as
 safeguard for vessels in fog, and sundry
 ancient mariners have declared that it would
 be useless or worse than useless. Some ex-
 periments made on the North river Tuesday
 night seem to show that the ancient mariners much mistaken. It is stated that all the
 objections heretofore urged against the use
 of the electric light on vessels are removed
 by the machine experimented with. The
 danger attributed to such lights heretofore
 has been that the reflection was thrown back
 into the eyes of the pilot and lookout, blind
 ing them to all distant objects. But with this
 present one there is no such disadvantage.
 The foreground is not so brilliantly illumina-
 ted as to cause the distance to fade away to
 the eye; only objects remote from the ship
 are made plainly visible In a light fog the
 pencil of light is more clearly defined, though some of it is reflected back in a thick fog it appears to be bright white spot in the
 dense atmosphere, yet in the densest fog it
 will penetrate distance of 2.0OO feet. By
 means of it one ship in approaching another
 at that distance would find itself in the midst
 of an intensely Illuminated fog, and knowing
 at once the cause could obviate all danger
 of collision. During the experiments the
 value of this headlight was demonstrated by the fact that when the beam was thrown on
 the track of the ferryboats in the river the
 lights of the boats were distinctly seen from
 the pilot house of the steamer; and when
 the boat itself passed through the beam she
 became plainly visible to the eye, her lights
 still remaining prominently in view, and as
 she passed into the darkness again her lamps
 retained their usual power in the eyes of the
 pilot, as if the electric headlight had not been
 in uEe