Today -100: November 11, 1914: They will do what is just

Formal declaration of war by Britain, France, Russia, Belgium and Serbia on Turkey.

At the Southern States Suffrage Conference in Chattanooga, Alva Belmont says that with the European armies “shelling cities and destroying everything before them, leaving women and children without a place to lay their heads, it is somewhat illogical to talk of woman’s sphere as the home.”  Asked whether negro women in the South should be allowed to vote, Belmont would not venture an opinion, saying it should be “left entirely to the men of the South to decide.  They will do what is just.”  There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.  “We seek for women political rights equal to those of men.  Negro women could share the rights of negro men. If they are disfranchised let the women share the same treatment.”  Since she, unlike most Southern suffragists, supports a national constitutional suffrage amendment, I wonder how she thinks it should be phrased to allow for racial discrimination.

The German government is complaining about vulgar cartoons of the heads of enemy states.  “Germany does not require such poisonous medicine and should leave such things to the English mob, the Paris apaches, and Russian moujiks.”

14 states are under quarantine for foot-and-mouth disease.

Psychic Headline of the Day -100:  “Psychic War News.”  The Occult Messenger (UK) reports, via psychic sources, that the Allies will do very well in November and that “The United States, the most unlikely people of all, will put a finger in the Turkish pie.”  Very unlikely: when the US finally did join the war with the Central Powers, it did not declare war on Turkey.

Carl Lody, the German spy, is executed at the Tower of London, the first execution there since the 11th Lord Lovat, a Jacobite, in 1747.

Germany is threatening to ban the importation of food into Belgium (whose population is being partly fed by American charity) unless Belgians return to work.  What work? the Belgians wonder, since the Belgian economy has been wrecked, bombed, thoroughly looted, and is in no shape to provide jobs.  Every means of transportation has been commandeered.

Mexico orders a secret German wireless station in Ensenada closed.

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