ITEMS OF INTEREST January 22, 1910 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

The Southern Pacific Terminal Company controls valuable docks and wharves at Galveston, Tex., nearly all the stock of which is owned by the Southern Pacific Company. In 1905 the terminal company leased to an importer of cotton-seed cake and meal, for five years, for $15,000, a pier 1,370 feet long, Within the enclosure were erected facilities for packing fifteen hundred tons of cake a day, and for grinding and sacking two hundred tons of meal daily. The importer was exempt from demurrage charges. There was a practical monopoly, and the complaint against the Southern Pacific Company was decided in favor of the plaintiff. It is understood that, as a result of this decision, upholding the Hepburn rate law, the interstate commission will now proceed to investigate alleged terminal discriminations which, it is said, extend to New York city, and an effort will be made to break up the practice of certain carriers which by contracts made in the name of subsidiary corporations, have granted exclusive terminal privileges to selected shippers and thus imposed a hardship upon all others. In some instances the effect of these discriminations has been to give the favored shipper a practical monopoly of export trade.

Urging that Congress proceed immediately to dispose of the Taft-Ballinger conservation program, without awaiting the outcome of the congressional investigation of the Ballinger-Pinchot dispute, President Taft, on the 14th day, transmitted his special message to Congress on the conservation of natural resources. He recommends laws providing for the conservation of the public lands; the safeguarding of power sites along rivers in the public domain; the validating of the withdrawals from entry made by the secretary of the interior under the disputed "supervisory power;" a detailed classification of public lands according to their use; the disposition of the agricultural and mineral resources of the same portions of the public lands separately; the rapid completion of the reclamation projects now under way and a thirty-million-dollar bond issue to finish and extend these projects; the extension of the activities of the forest service; the conservation of the soil, and the carrying out of an extensive program of land and waterways improvement.

In his recent speech before the Pennsylvania Society in New York city, Mr. Knox, secretary of state, made a plea for the establishment of a genuinely judicial tribunal for the adjudication of differences among the Powers. At present the court of arbitration of The Hague is not permanent. It is nothing but a panel or list of judges designated by the signatory Powers for a term of six years. Secretary Knox concludes that, as the Hague conference has established an international prize court, that court might be invested with the jurisdiction and functions of a court of arbitral justice, and that the United States, as the originator of this project, might look forward to its expansion so as to adjudicate cases arising in peace as well as controversies incident to war. In pursuance of this Mr. Knox has sent out circular notes to the governments signatory to The Hague convention.

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