Items of Interest November 18, 1905 Issue

Items of Interest

The Secretary of the Interior has awarded the contract for the construction of the Belle Fourche dam, South Dakota, and distribution canals. The dam, when completed, will be one hundred feet high in the highest place, one mile long, and twenty feet wide on top. The area of water surface will be nearly nine thousand acres, and the water will be sixty feet deep, and will irrigate about eighty-five thousand acres of land. The bid on the dam was $874,164.

In the year 1901 an officer of the United States Department of Commerce and Labor, says the Scientific American suggested that for the furtherance of export trade it would be an excellent idea to equip a large steamer as a floating exposition of American products, and dispatch it on a tour of the principal ports of the world. Great Britain and, we believe, Germany have already tried the experiment. A strong company has been formed in New York and has decided to adopt the suggestion. It is proposed to equip a steamer of about eight thousand tons for the special purpose of the expedition, and fit up the various decks with exposition booths of much the same character as those to be seen in any of the great industrial exhibitions, with the one important exception, however, that only exhibits of a thoroughly serious character will be accepted, those of a trivial or purely speculative and doubtful character being refused. The steamer, in addition to devoting three decks to exhibits, will have living accommodations for about two hundred representatives of exhibitors. A route has been laid out which will include a visit to practically every port of importance in the world, and will involve a journey of about sixty thousand miles, the trip around the world being made in about fifteen month's time.

Chairman Shonts of the Isthmian Canal Commission, in a speech last week at the New Willard Hotel, Washington, before the American Hardware Manufacturers' Association, said: "In my opinion it is a mistake to handicap the construction of the Panama Canal by any laws save those of police and sanitation. I want to go on record here that the application of the eight-hour law, of the contract labor law, of the Chinese exclusion act, or of any other act passed, or to be passed, by Congress for the benefit of American labor at home, to labor on the Isthmus, is a serious error. Over eighty percent of the employes of the Canal will be aliens. A majority of the other twenty percent employed will be in a clerical or supervisory capacity. The application of these laws on the Isthmus will benefit a very small number of American laborers, but will enormously add to the cost of construction, and American labor at home will have to pay its share of the consequent increase in taxation."

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