Lament for the hanging of a 17-year-old murderer
Friday, 11 June 2010 05:00
One hundred years ago, clippings from the newspapers of June 11, 1910.
The Peterborough Review laments the hanging of a youth:
The government says that Robert Henderson must die for killing Margaret McPherson. So the law will slay the child. Just 17, this unfortunate youth would have been better had he died a babe.
They took a life for a life in the days of Moses, but the Almighty is on record as leaving Cain alive. In building homes, we no longer live in tents, as the ancients. In battle we no longer use the ram. In all things we have progressed, exploring earth, air and sea. But we still hang, and on the 23rd of this month an irresponsible degenerate youth will be dispatched, not by the garrote, as in Spain, by the guillotine, or gun, as in war, but by the end of a rope, and this in a city of churches, in this civilized land, in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and ten.
Faster mail than today
Halifax Herald.Trans-Atlantic mail by steamship a century ago seems to have been faster than trans-Canada airmail today. The SS Empress of Ireland, carrying British mail, left Liverpool at 6 pm on Friday, June 3, and reached Quebec City by 6 pm on Thursday, after a record-fast passage. “Letters posted in Liverpool last Friday afternoon will be on the breakfast tables of Torontonians tomorrow [Friday] morning, less than seven days,” says the Herald.
Lindsay’s sewage defended
Lindsay Post (June 10). The Post rallies to the defence of the town’s ozone sewage treatment plant, following a test made by the Provincial Board of Health and unfavourable comments by Toronto’s Sanitary Review magazine.
Suffice it to say the article smacks of the same bombastic twaddle and ridicule which is characteristic of the journals published in Toronto—journals that have sneered and scoffed at the ozone system of water purification.
He who laughs last laughs best, is an old adage and it ill become the Sanitary Review or any other publication to sneer or condemn a system which has proven a success in other places and which will be found to be a success in Lindsay when the results of a second test are made public. The Sanitary Review and others of its ilk, will find plenty to do in trying to convince the people of Toronto that the slow system of sand filtration being installed there is not a colossal fake.
The annuity idea
Toronto Globe. Government pensions and unemployment insurance lay well in the future but “The annuity idea is making rapid headway” as means of averting poverty, especially in old age, opines the Globe.
Government of Canada annuities are now offered to “encourage thrift among wage earners” and “provide an absolutely certain, safe and profitable means of investing their saving in order to prepare for old age,” federal annuities superintendent S.T. Bastedo tells the Toronto Employers’ Association. The annuities, he says, can be purchased by any frugal person with a steady job, regardless of how little the income might be. They will be needed, says the Globe:
“The day of opportunity on the American continent is passing. The free lands will be exhausted in another quarter of a century. Great cities, here as in Europe, must inevitably mean at times unemployment and suffering. The fear of poverty must become ever present in many lives, and, above all, the dread of poverty in old age, when the capacity of earning is gone.”
A senior walker
Belleville Intelligencer.“Mrs. Sarah Neville of Dresden [Ontario], aged 80 years, walked 17 miles from Dresden to Chatham yesterday, to renew a writ in the county court clerk’s office. Mrs. Neville has been doing this once a year for three years. She does not care to ride on trains, because she objects to tobacco smoke in the depot and the cars.” The report does not say when Mrs. Neville returned home, but if it was the same day, it was a 34-mile (55-kilometer) walk.
Uppers and lowers
Montreal Star.The Railway Commission is wresting with a proposed change in fees for sleeping berths, which would make a lower higher than an upper. The commission favours a proposed change that would raise the charge for lower berths from $2 to $2.5 and reduced the charge for upper berths from $2 to $1.50. The railways oppose any reduction in the charge for upper berths.