Article September 14, 1899 Issue

Miscellany

Uncle Sam's Odd Bills.

Every one knows that it costs almost four hundred million dollars a year to run the United States Government in times of peace, and that the departments of War and the Navy, the Indian and the pension bureaus, absorb the larger part of this amount; but in the course of years a large number of dependents upon Uncle Sam's purse have come into being, of which the general public knows little. Such, for example, are the International Bureau for the Repression of the African Slave Trade, located at Brussels, a highly laudable institution, to the expenses of which our Government contributes $100 a year; the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, also at Brussels, to which $2,270 is contributed, and the International Geodetic Association, the expenses of which our Government shares to the extent of $1,500 yearly. As a leading member of the group of nations specially interested in humane and philanthropic work, we subscribe $325 a year to a lighthouse service on the coast of Morocco; about $4,500 to be divided among citizens of other lands for service rendered to shipwrecked American seamen; $500 a year toward maintaining a hospital for sailors at Panama, and $9,000 for keeping and feeding American convicts imprisoned in foreign countries. Among the unfamiliar purposes in the home country for which money is appropriated from the federal treasury is the maintenance of the Washington Monument, costing $11,520 annually, and the provision of artificial limbs for soldiers, calling for $547,000 a year.

Leslie's Weekly.

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