Today -100: December 18, 1914: Of protectorates, imperial swearing, cows, and lions

Britain declares Egypt a protectorate, ending the very nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire.

Votes for Women (London) complains that the number of places from which women are excluded under wartime regulations is growing daily, including public houses during certain hours, the streets of Cardiff (but only for “certain women”), and St. Paul’s Cathedral after 9 p.m.

Germany and France are exchanging interned civilians.

After being told of the losses in Serbia, Austrian Emperor Franz Josef is said to have “swore like a trooper.”

In a lawsuit case of breach of promise of marriage in which the man broke off his engagement when the woman, after consulting a physician and a fortune-teller, told him that she probably wouldn’t have children, NY Supreme Court Justice Benton told the jury that eugenics demands they rule against her, because “Civilization itself demands not only that children be born, but that they may be born to a proper heritage mentally and physically.”  The jury agreed.

Herbert Hoover asks for donations of canned milk to Belgium, all of the country’s cows having been seized by the Germans.

The British military censors plan to close their office for a day and a half for Christmas, so there will be no war news whatsoever.

The official British report on yesterday’s German bombardment of coastal towns says that 108 people were killed.  Hartlepool’s gas works were destroyed.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Five Lions Loose in Theatre Throng.”  They escape after performing their “man-eating lion” act at the Eighty-Sixth Street Theatre, while the quartet was playing, because of course you follow lions with a quartet (barbershop quartet, I think).  One, named Alice, Alice the lion, was cornered by police on the fourth floor of a tenement and shot dead.  The others never left the theater – it’s cold outside in New York in December – and were herded back into their cage.

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