Today -100: December 26, 1915: You cannot haggle with an earthquake

The NYT Index for this date is totally fucked up.

(Updated: and for the rest of the year. Grr.)

British Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George meets with trade union officials and shop stewards in Glasgow to guilt-trip them into diluting the rules on skilled labor that they fought so long and hard for: “Either we must tell the soldiers that we are sorry that we cannot get the guns to enable them to win throughout 1916, owing to the trade-union regulations... Another alternative is that we might tell the Kaiser frankly that we cannot go on. He might let us off with the annexation of Belgium, with the payment of indemnity, and with a British colony or two, but he certainly would demand that Great Britain surrender her command of the sea, and Great Britain then would be as completely at the mercy of Prussian despotism as Belgium is today.” He tells them, “All this chattering about relaxing a rule and suspending a custom is out of place. You cannot haggle with an earthquake.”

Henry Ford’s peace mission crumbles some more. Famous suffragist Inez Milholland Boissevain quits, saying the expedition is “a confused mass of amiably intentioned persons of vague thinking and no collective planning.” And Swedish peace groups aren’t interested in working with them on their vanishingly vague plans. They’ll be moving on to Denmark.

Sen. George Chamberlain (D-Oregon), chair of the Sen. Military Affairs Committee, will introduce a bill for compulsory military training for every male aged 12 to 23. But they don’t get to play with guns until they’re 14.

New automobile accessories are being sold, such as cigar shields, to prevent your cigar going out, and “baby holders,” which are not so much baby seats as hammocks.

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