Today -100: February 8, 1914: Of banditos, precious peas, cocaine fiends, and boobs

Mexican bandit – ah, fuck it, bandito – Maximo Castillo holds up a train, then allows it to enter a tunnel at the other end of which the bandits had set some stock cars on fire. 41 people on the train, including some Americans, suffocate to death. This may have been an act of revenge for the recent execution of 22 of Castillo’s banditos by the rebels.

Christabel Pankhurst confirms to the NYT that there has indeed been a break with her sister Sylvia over methods. She says Sylvia’s methods go too far and endanger human life (which is not true) while hers (well, not hers, she’s just sitting it out in Paris, but her followers’) only destroy property (arson being not at all dangerous to human life). Sylvia explains to the Daily Sketch that “It is not a split; it is an extension.” She notes that certain methods, like a no-rent strike, wouldn’t work except in the East End, while others, such as the burning of mail boxes, would be inappropriate where the people are poor. Nora Dacre Fox, who has day-to-day control of the WSPU in London, says that the cause of the split was Sylvia’s refusal to eschew men’s assistance and her use of mass methods that “tend to make it a class movement”.

The split makes the NYT has a sad: “We had come to look upon them as two precious peas in one pod.”

The Catholic Church tries to force the Abbé Jules Lemire, a deputy in the French National Assembly, to resign. He’s been a deputy for 20 years, but in recent years has moved away from the monarchist Right.

An article in the NYT Sunday Magazine suggests that one effect of the spread of prohibition in the South is to turn negroes into cocaine fiends, driving them to murder and insanity.

Marie Lloyd is allowed into the US.

NYT Sunday Book Review review of the Day -100: “BOOBS. As Seen by John Henry. By George V. Hobart. Illustrated by Edward Carey.”

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