Mr. W. S. Hallock, the editor of the Christian at Work, has been in Bermuda this season, and in a letter to his paper recalls the fact that the first settlers of that island were a drove of hogs who escaped thither from a wrecked vessel. They thrived so well that the next comers found the land filled with swine. Mr. Hallock adds: “It is probably the only successful instance of the commune to be found in all history.” The point scored is that communism is good for hogs.
This spring the West Indian war is in Cuba. It is commonly held in Hayti. An expedition headed by one Aguero escaped from Key West in April and, being joined in Cuba by many dissatisfied persons, made some headway as a revolution. Our government promptly issued orders to prevent the reënforcement of Aguero from this country. The hot weather will suppress the revolutionists—if they are natives of the United States.
Waiters on roller-skates is a novelty introduced into an Omaha hotel. Labor-saving contrivances in the household seem to have stopped with the sewing machine—and it is denied by husbands that this machine saves labor. It is rather a means of putting more work on a dress with the same amount of labor of the hand.
Herbert Spencer has been trying to prove that slavery is little different from our ordinary social freedom. A man must work, he says, most of the time for another person in either case. Yes, but it is a great satisfaction to select the man you will work for. And, in freedom, the workman is always working for himself. Mr. Spencer should try being a slave for a length of time sufficient to teach him the moral distinction between that state and freedom.
One of the papers, noticing the death of a fast trotting horse, says that he was ill only fifteen minutes. Similar statements are frequently made respecting distinguished men; and the prayer book contains a petition to be delivered from sudden death. We note the facts for the sake of remarking that sudden death by disease, either in horses or men, never happens. Diseases act much more slowly, and the man who dies of a fever has probably been ill for months. The moral is, attend to the first symptoms of illness.