ITEMS OF INTEREST May 4, 1907 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

It is not improbable that President Roosevelt may soon announce to the Chinese Government that the United States does not care to receive any more money on account of the indemnity awarded to this country, growing out of the Boxer uprising. China has already paid the United States $5,000,000, almost enough to satisfy the claims of American citizens injured by the rights and to reimburse the Government for the cost of the expedition sent to the relief of Pekin. President Roosevelt has let it be known that he thinks it would be unjust to China to have the United States profit financially by the Boxer uprising. As things now stand this Government will net about $16,000,000 or $18,000,000 out of the settlement of that trouble, unless China is told to stop payments. The money' demands made upon China by the combined Powers amounted to about $360,000,000 and the share of the United States was about $25,000,000.

The following reply was recently made to an official of the W. C. T. U.: "Our company controls advertising space in ninety-five per cent of the street car lines of New England for the next ten years. I have given orders that from this time on, no solicitation be made and no advertising be taken for liquors, beer, or any other article coming in the line of intoxicants. We have one contract running now in the surface cars, and a small one on the elevated, that we shall be obliged to carry until the contract terminates or suffer heavy damages; but after these expire you may be assured that there will be no more advertising of this kind in our cars." It was learned that it would cost the company $180,000 to refuse to accept contracts already in sight for the coming year.

Investigation has already been set afoot, largely through the instrumentality of the President, for the valuation of the Government coal lands of the West. This work will put the Land Office in a position to sell the remaining Government coal lands at something like their real value, instead of at the nominal price of $1.25 an acre. The work that has been done already indicates that there are hundreds of thousands of acres of coal land all over the public domain in the West that will rank with the best West Virginia steam coal as a power producer, though it will have to be used through the medium of a gas engine.

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