Today -100: April 5, 1912: Of cats, piles of skulls, fugitives, and forced flag-kissing

Germany is considering a tax on cats to pay for armaments.

President David Starr Jordan of Stanford University says that nations should be gentlemen and arbitrate their differences rather than go to war. He says that if the skulls of the victims of the Napoleonic Wars were placed together, the pile would be 31 times as tall as the Washington Monument, and 31,000 times as awesome. Okay, he didn’t say that last part, but it totally would be.

Christabel Pankhurst Rumor of the Day: The NYT reports that fugitive British suffragette Christabel Pankhurst has reached the United States and is living in NYC under an assumed name. According to a Major George William Horsfield, who claims to have spotted her aboard the Mauretania and seen through her clever disguise (a veil), “No one who has ever seen her aggressive-looking face, with its over-hanging black eyebrows, could make a mistake.” And yet...

Deputies and armed San Diegans meet a train on which 100 Wobblies were arriving and force them to kiss the American flag, then throw them out of the county into Orange County.