PART II.
CHRONICLE OF EVENTS
IN 1914.
JANUARY.
1. The official list of New Year Honours comprised one new Viscount (the Rt. Hon. James Bryce, who took the title of Lord Bryce of Dechmont), four new Barons (Sir Rufus Isaacs, Lord Strathclyde—the Scottish judge, Mr. Alexander Ure,—Sir C. A. Cripps, and Sir Harold Harmsworth, whose titles were respectively Lord Reading, Lord Strathclyde, Lord Parmoor of Frieth, and Lord Rothermere), and five new Privy Councillors (Lord Colebrooke, Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson, the Hon. William F. Massey, Premier of New Zealand, Mr. W. H. Dickinson, M.P., and Sir Christopher Nixon, Bt.). There were six new Baronets, among them Sir Gerard Lowther, G.C.M.G., lately Ambassador at Constantinople, and Colonel Sir Edward Ward, K.C.B., Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office. Among the twenty-two new Knights were Mr. Owen Seaman, Editor of Punch since 1906; Judge Lumley Smith, late Judge of the City of London Court; Mr. W. E. Garforth, an inventor of safety appliances in coal mines; and Mr. Ernest Rutherford, F.R.S. The Order of Merit was conferred on Sir Archibald Geikie, President of the Royal Society.
—Mr. Llewelyn Archer Atherley Jones, K.C., appointed a Judge of the City of London Court, vice Judge Lumley Smith, retired.
—At Paris, in a Rugby international football match, Ireland beat France by eight points to six.
3. The Home Secretary refused to reconsider the sentence of four months' imprisonment passed at the Stafford Assizes on Thomas William Stewart, a Rationalist lecturer. The reasons for the refusal were, in substance, that the prisoner was punished, not for holding opinions or arguing in support of them, but for utterances designed to wound the feelings of his hearers, and that his speeches on religion were intended to advertise, for his own profit, his lectures on other subjects and certain appliances sold by him, in respect of which he was accused of indecency.
3-4. Further severe storms on the New Jersey coast, doing much damage at Atlantic City and Seabright.