Today -100: June 6, 1914: I pray God it may not be necessary for our boys at Vera Cruz to use any more force

Britain has recently banned mixed-race boxing matches.

A Milan jury, evidently convinced by Vincenzo Perugia’s claim that he only stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in order to return it to Italy and certainly not for money, gives him only a one-year sentence.

The London Times ponders how suffragettes might be dealt with. They can’t be deported to an uninhabited island because they’d just come back. Flogging isn’t really on. The general public would be okay with letting the hunger strikers starve themselves to death, but under the current law prison authorities are legally liable for prisoners’ survival. The Times supports new legislation to remove that liability. Indeed, it rather licks its lips at the thought of suffragettes dying in prison.

The NYT mentions the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’s campaign to oppose Liberal candidates for parliament and back Labour ones as a means to achieve women’s suffrage. Which I mention because, while the NYT deplores the militant suffragettes and keeps insisting their tactics won’t achieve anything, this is their first mention of the non-militant NUWSS, which is far larger than the militant wing of the suffrage movement, in months, and even this mention is a parenthetical aside in an article headlined “Another Church Burned.” The London Times isn’t much better. Organize 100 quiet meetings and 1,000 quiet petitions and *crickets* but burn one church....

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond refuses to meet suffragists, saying previous meetings only led to unpleasantness – and if there’s one thing Irish politicians hate, it’s unpleasantness – and that the issue of suffrage should be decided by the Home Rule Parliament rather than in the Home Rule Bill. Of course that means a Home Rule Parliament elected exclusively by men.

Woodrow Wilson, speaking to graduates of Annapolis: “I pray God it may not be necessary for our boys at Vera Cruz to use any more force.” He calls the US army and navy “the instruments of civilization, not... instruments of aggression.”

The Mexican Federales will probably send gunboats to intercept the Antilla and its cargo of arms for the rebels. If that happens, they will probably be stopped by US warships. Also, another ship has left another US port with arms for the rebels, even though the US was supposed to be preventing that while talks are going on.

Speaking of gun-running, some Ulsterman with a yacht smuggles 3,000 rifles to the Ulster Volunteers, most of which are unloaded in Belfast “under the eyes of the police,” whatever that means.

Margaret Brown, aka “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” of Titanic fame, is running for the US Senate in Colorado.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first Tarzan book, Tarzan of the Apes, is published.

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