Today -100: February 10, 1916: Wherein trousers are dropped from an aeroplane

Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes says he is “totally opposed” to the suggestion that he run for president and he is “entirely out of politics.” So I guess that settles that.

Name of the Day -100: the man to whom Hughes wrote those things, Rep. C. Bascom Slemp (R-Virginia).

Belgium rejects a German offer of a separate peace, passed through the papal nuncio to Belgium. Under the offer, they would get their king back and Germany would control Antwerp (and its port). (Follow-up: Belgium will soon deny that there was any such offer).

Elly Reuss, a 75-year-old Seventh Day Adventist in Germany, is sentenced by a military tribunal to 7 months for preaching that soldiers shouldn’t kill. On the sabbath. The other 6 days of the week, anything goes.

The US and Germany are still negotiating over the Lusitania.  It’s down to a single word. The US wants Germany to “recognize” its liability to pay indemnities for the deaths of Americans rather than “assume” that liability, in other words to make it a matter of international law rather than Germany paying up voluntarily out of the goodness of its heart.

Book of the Day -100: Theodore Roosevelt’s Fear God and Take Your Own Part. A collection of articles on subjects warlike,

it became a best-seller.

Another chivalric story of the Modern Day Knights of the Air™: A British aeroplane is brought down by a German plane and the captured pilot’s trousers are simply ruined. He makes such a fuss about it that the German pilot who shot him down gets back in his plane and drops a note over the British lines. An hour later a British plane drops a pair of trousers. Could this silly story possibly be true?

Following on from the panic (or whatever passes for panic in Canada) over the Germans who undoubtedly probably burned down the Parliament building comes a scare over just how many people of German parentage or even German birth there are in the Canadian government.

Headline of the Day -100:

That dude will eat anything. The former president tells a dinner of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs how when he was governor  of the Philippines he introduced baseball as a way to bore civilize the natives. He says it entirely converted mountain tribes from the Filipino National Pastime (head hunting) to the American one.

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