ITEMS OF INTEREST

Commissioner Hermann of the General Land Office of the United States has recently issued a book entitled, "The Louisiana Purchase and our Title West of the Rocky. Mountains," in which are furnished reasons for the correction of the latest official map of the United States, so far as it represents that part of our country west of the Rocky Mountains from the Canada line to the forty-second parallel of latitude, as having been acquired through the Louisiana purchase. The Commissioner, who is an ardent annexationist, adds some interesting pages to his work, in which he points out the immense benefits which have accrued to this country as the result of the policy of annexation from the earliest history of the republic to the present time. One of his sweeping assertions is, that the grand total of sums paid for our foreign acquisitions amounts to $52,000,000, a sum less than the value of one year's output of Montana's minerals, or Minnesota's annual wheat yield, or of the cattle and hay product of California of one year. The objection to our accepting territory because of its remoteness weighs for nothing with him. He calls attention to the fact that Hawaii is more accessible to the United States than was the settled portion of Louisiana in Jefferson's time, of Florida in Munroe's, of Oregon in Polk's time. California, when admitted into the Union, he insists, was far more inaccessible than is Hawaii to-day. General Joseph Lane, the first territorial Governor of Oregon, had to consume about six months in the journey from Indiana to the mouth of the Columbia River. The book contains much more of a similarly interesting nature.

The arrival of the Spanish merchant steamship Gran Antilla from Havana was the cause of much evident gratification to all the people of the harbor. She was greeted with hand-waving, cheers, and the tooting of whistles from the tugs and steamboats as soon as her nationality was discovered from a sight of her flag at the peak of the gaff, to which her own crew responded by waving their caps.

She was received as the harbinger of peace, being the first vessel that has presumed to show the Spanish colors in any American port since the war began; and her reception proves that, forceful and resolute as the American people are in war, they yet love peace with all mankind and are glad to believe that the battle-flags are to be furled, and would be gladder still to know that "the war drums throb no longer" the world over.—Brooklyn Citizen.