Today -100: March 23, 1914: The soldiers have the bayonets, and I have nothing but the Constitution

Sylvia Pankhurst and a thousand of her closest friends attempt to attend services at Westminster Abbey. Sylvia is carried on a stretcher because of weakness from her umpteenth hunger strike. Slight problem: when you announce plans like this in advance, people tend to show up to watch the fireworks, and the Abbey was full by the time she arrived. She held a meeting outside the Abbey, then went home in an ambulance.

Kaiser Wilhelm leaves for Corfu for a conference with his fellow Triple Alliance monarchs, Austria’s ancient Franz Joseph and Italy’s Vittorio Emanuele, to discuss monarch business.

Gen. Blas Orpinal, one of the Mexican generals who escaped from a US refugee camp, is recaptured, disguised as a peon.

British Prime Minister Asquith denies that the movement of troops and ships had anything to do with coercing Ulster but were of a “purely precautionary character,” or that arrest warrants were issued for Unionist leaders, or that he intends a “general inquisition” of officers as to whether they would “take up arms against Ulster.” It’s odd that he’s referring to Ulster not only as if it were united (“against Ulster”), but as if it were united against his policies. A reminder: this is 9 Northern Irish counties we’re talking about, some of them with Catholic majorities, not the 6 counties that became the current province.

The anarchists who led the march down 5th Ave in New York yesterday (Emma Goldman’s “crowd of dupes,” as the NYT calls them) are forming an organization of the unemployed, to take what they need.

On Malekula Island in the New Hebrides, six native teachers from the Walla Island mission station are eaten by cannibals, as was the custom.

Mother Jones is heading back to the Colorado mine region in defiance of military orders, saying she expects to be arrested: “the soldiers have the bayonets, and I have nothing but the Constitution.”

Charles Young, a negro accused of assaulting an old white woman, is lynched near Mapleville, Alabama.

Headline of the Day -100 (L.A. Times): “Mangled Finger Saves Lives of a Hundred.” A freight train went out of control and wrecked at Butler, California, but it didn’t hit a work train which had been diverted because of a Mexican laborer whose mangled finger needed medical treatment. Not really as interesting a story as the headline suggested.

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