Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/1047

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1002
SAGAR—SAGINAW

monasterial church, a medieval town-hall with old cloisters attached, a Roman Catholic gymnasium and a large hospital, named after its founder, the duchess Dorothea (1793–1862), wife of Edmund, duke of Talleyrand-Périgord-Dino. The leading industry of the town is cloth-weaving, with wool and flax spinning; there is also some trade in wool and grain.

The mediate principality of Sagan, now forming a portion of the Prussian governmental district of Liegnitz, and formed in 1397 out of a portion of the duchy of Glogau, has several times changed hands by purchase as well as by inheritance. One of its most famous possessors was Wallenstein, who held it for seven years before his death in 1634. Bought by Prince Lobkowitz in 1646, the principality remained in his family until 1787, when it was sold to Peter, duke of Courland, whose descendant, Prince Bozon (b. 1832), son of Napoleon Louis (1811–1898), duke of Talleyrand-Périgord, owned it in 1910. The principality has an area of nearly 500 sq. m. and a population of 65,000.


SAGAR or Saugor Island, an island at the mouth of the Hugli river, in the Twenty-four Parganas district of Bengal. The word means “ sea ”; and, as being the place where the sacred stream of the Ganges is believed to mingle with the ocean, the island is one of the most frequented places of Hindu pilgrimage in all India, the time for the greatest annual gathering being in January. On the seaward face is a lighthouse, and farther out are the Sandheads, the cruising-ground of the Calcutta pilots.


SAGASTA, PRAXEDES MATEO (1827-1903), Spanish statesman, was born on the 21st of July 1827 at, T orrecilla de Cameros, in the province of Logrono. He began life as an engineer, and from his college days he displayed very advanced Liberal inclinations. He entered the Cortes in 1854 as a Progressist deputy for Zamora. After the coup d'élat of Don Leopold O'D0nnell in 1856, Sagasta had to go into exile in France, but promptly returned, to become the manager of the Progressist paper La Iberia, and to sit in the Cortes from 1859 to 1863. He seconded the Progressist and revolutionary campaign, of Prim and the Progressists against the throne of Queen Isabella, conspiring and going into exile with them. He returned, via Gibraltar, with Prim, Serrano and others, to take part in the rising at Cadiz, which culminated in the revolution of September 1868, and Sagasta was in succession a minister several times under Serrano and then under King Amadeo of Savoy, 1868-1872. Sagasta ultimately headed the most Conservative groups of the revolutionary politicians against Ruiz Zorrilla and the Radicals, and against the Federal Republic in 1873. He took office under Marshal Serrano during 1874, after the pronunciamienlo of General Pavia had done away with the Cortes and the Federal Republic. He vainly attempted to crush the Carlists in 1874, and to check the Alphonsist military conspiracy that overthrew the government of Marshal Serrano at the end of December 1874. Barely eight months after the restoration of the Bourbons in the autumn of 187 5, Sagasta accepted the new state of things, and organized the Liberal dynastic party that confronted Canovas and the Conservatives for five years in the Cortes, until the Liberal leader used the influence of his military allies, Jovellar, Campos and others, to induce the king to ask him to form a Cabinet in 1881. The Liberals only retained the confidence of the king by postponing the realization of almost all their democratic and reforming programme, and limiting their edorts to financial reorganization and treaties of commerce. A military and republican rising hastened Sagasta's fall, and he was not readmitted into the councils of Alphonso XII. On the death of that king in 1885, Sagasta became premier with the assent of Canovas, who suspended party hostility III the early days of the regency of Queen Christina. Sagasta remained in oE1ce until 1890, long enough to carry out all his reform programme, including universal suffrage and the establishment of trial by jury. A coalition of generals and Conservatives turned Sagasta out in July 1890, and he only returned to the councils of the regency in December 1892, .when the Conservative party split into two groups under Canovas and Silvela. He was still in office when the final rising of the Cubans began in February 1895, and he had to resign in March 'because he could not find superior officers in the army willing to help him to put down the turbulent and disgraceful demonstrations of the subalterns of Madrid garrison against newspapers which had given offence to the military. Sagasta kept quiet until nearly the end of the struggle with the colonies, when the queen-regent had to dismiss the Conservative party, much shorn of its prestige by the failure of its efforts to pacify the colonies, and by the assassination of its chief, Canovas de1Castillo. Sagasta's attempt to conciliate both the Cubans and the United States by a tardy offer of colonial home rule, the recall of General Weyler, and other concessions, did not avert the disastrous war with the United States and its catastrophe. The Liberal party and Sagasta paid the penalty of their lack of success, and directly the Cortes met in March 1899, after the peace treaty of the 10th of December 1898 with the United States, they were defeated in the senate. He pursued his policy of playing into the hands of the sovereign whilst keeping up the appearances of aLiberal, almost democratic, leader, skilful in debate, a trimmer par excellence, and abler in opposition than in office. He returned with the Liberals to power in March 1901. His task, however, was beyond his years. The economic situation was of the gravest. Strikes and discontent were rife. Still, Sagasta held on long enough to witness the surrender of the regency by Queen Christina into the hands of her son, Alfonso XIII., in May 1902. In the following December Sagasta Ewas defeated on a vote of censure and resigned office. Shortly afterwards he fell into ill-health, and died at Madrid on the IStl'1 of January 1903.


SAGE, RUSSELL (1816-1906), American financier, was born in Verona township, Oneida county, New York, on the 4th of August 1816. He worked as a farm-hand until he was 15, when he became an errand boy in a grocery conducted by his brother, Henry R. Sage, in Troy, New York. He had a part interest in 1837-1839 in a retail grocery in Troy, and in a wholesale store there in 1839-1857. He served as an alderman of Troy in 1841-1848, and as treasurer of Rensselaer county in 1845-1849. In 1853-1857 he was a Whig representative in Congress. He became an associate of Jay Gould in the development and sale of railways; and in 1863 removed to New York City, where, besides speculating in railway stocks, he became a money-lender and a dealer in "puts" and "calls" and "privileges," and in 1874 bought a seat in the New York Stock Exchange. He gradually accumulated a fortune, which at his death was variously estimated as from $60,000,000 to $80,000,000. On the 4th of December 1891 an attempt was made to assassinate him in his office by one Henry Norcross, who demanded a large sum of money, and upon being refused exploded a dynamite bomb, and was himself killed.[1] Sage died in New York on the 22nd of July 1906. In 1869 he had married Miss Margaret Olivia Slocum (b. 1828), a graduate (1847) of the Troy Female Seminary (now the Emma Willard School). She inherited nearly all of his great fortune, and out of it she gave away a long series of liberal benefactions to various institutions


SAGINAW, a city and the county-seat of Saginaw county, Michigan, U.S.A., situated on both banks of the Saginaw river, about 16 m. from its entrance into Saginaw Bay and about 96 m. N.W. of Detroit. Pop. (1890) 46,322, (1900) 42,345, of whom 11,435 were foreign-born, (1910) 50, 510. Saginaw is served by the Grand Trunk, seven divisions of the Pere Marquette (which has repair shops here) and four divisions of the Michigan Central railways, by interurban electric railways to Detroit and Bay City, and by steamboat lines to several of the lake ports. The city is built on level ground covering an area of about 13 sq. m. and somewhat more elevated than the surrounding country. In the city are St Vincent's Orphan Home (1875) and St Mary's Hospital (1874) under the Sisters of Charity, a Woman's Hospital (1888) and the Saginaw General Hospital Mr Sage's secretary was also killed, and one of his clerks, W. R. Laidlaw, jr., was badly injured. Laidlaw afterward repeatedly sued Sage for damages, claiming that Sage had used him as a shield at the moment of the explosion, but his suits were unsuccessful.

  1. Mr Sage's secretary was also killed, and one of his clerks, W. R. Laidlaw, jr., was badly injured. Laidlaw afterward repeatedly sued Sage for damages, claiming that Sage had used him as a shield at the moment of the explosion, but his suits were unsuccessful.