The San Francisco call., 1896-05-24
ss OF RUSSIA AS THEY APPEARED AT DIFFERENT TINES

is left of his party formally to pass pub
lie appeal to the Parnelltss TO join him
and then giving the appeal to the press,
bat actually not sending a copy of it to
Redmond, to whom il was nominally ad-
dressed. Redmond accordingly scores a
point on this stupid omission, as well as
insultingly dismlsses the proposal as too
ridiculous for serious consideration. / am
amazed to see, too, Alfred Webb's letter
in the Times of the 11th inst, asserting
that Healy's followers receive as large a
portion of the parliamentary fund as do
the Dillonites. The facts are that six
Healy mer are on the list as receiving ses-
sional salaries and at least twenty-six Dill
lonites, while several others of the latter
get irregular grants when there happens
TO be any money on hand, which is very
rarely now. 1t is true that Mr.. Webb was
one OF the treasurers of the fund for long
while, but he seems not to know at all
what is being done with the money, of
which he nominally had partial charge.
He is an elderly Quaker gentleman of
high character, whose presence in the
party lent it respectability. but he was
never allowed TO penetrate any secrets of
the machine as manipulated by Dillon and
Xavier O'Brien.
Agricultural returns issued last night
for 1895 reveal some remarkable facts The
wheat acreage has diminished by 510,0 600
acres in a single year. The total diminu-
ton since 1885 has been Just under 2,000,-
000 acres, of which two-thirds were in the
last five years, leaving now less than 1900
acres under wheat, all told. To some ex-
tent barley and fruit have taken the place
of wheat, but the great bulk of the land
has gone to grass. Notwithstanding this,
dead meat imports continue to mount up,
over 100000 tons, of which three-f -fourths
are from the United States, coming in last
year. The total annual imports of wheat
and -four have now reached the tremen-
dous figure of $150,000000. When, how
ever, it is realized that the British farmers
are so unenterprising as to allow $50, ,000 :
GOO worth of foreign eggs to be brought
into the country yearly simply because
they will not bother with poultry, it is
difficult to get up any deep sympathy for
them.
The great wheel imported from Chicago
and now at the Colonial Exhibition here
has been misbehaving. 1t stuck with sixty
imprisoned passengers all through cold
foggy night The episode has a phase
which will not be commented on here
The morning paper having the news was
the telegraph, which said that an hour
past midnight the wheel was still stuck
1t will hardly be accredited in America
but a. o'clock the next afternoon the ST.
James Gazette and the Westminster Ga
zette appeared, quoting the Telegraph's S
account without single added word. The
wheel is within four miles of their offices
and connected by telephone, yet it had oc-
CURED to no one in either Office during the
whole forenoon to inquire whether it had
been set in motion or not.
The Morning Post in a review of Mark
Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan
of Arc' expresses a cautious doubt whether
Clemens is not really having joke at the
public's expense. Such a conclusion, it
says, would be premature, but it feels that
there will be justifable uncertainty on
the part of many readers until the author
has actually produced his original unpub-
lished manuscript in the national archives
of France for public inspection.
1t has been many years since London
has had such a CORY surfeit of sensational
capital trials. Three men are to be hanged
at Newgate on June for two burgIarious
murders of peculiar atrocity. And yester-
day the woman Dyer was sentenced to
death for the systematic destruction OF
homeless children placed with her by their
parents. These children she strangled and
threw into the Thames at Reading. She
is supposed to have thus killed fifty or
more OF them. An effort was made TO save
her on the plea of insanity, but there
would have been universal outcry if it
had succeeded. Several other murder