ITEMS OF INTEREST March 19, 1910 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Gifford Pinchot, in an address before an audience of twenty-five hundred people in Carnegie Hall, New York, last week, said: "There is a vigorous, well-organized, clear-cut opposition to the movement of conservation, as it was defined by Mr. Roosevelt. This is an active fight, more bitter day by day, to set public welfare ahead of private welfare and to prove that public welfare ought to come first. The principles of conservation are those which govern the cost of living, of water-power, of heat, of all things susceptible to the monopolistic influences. The individual is fighting with this truth in mind—that the exclusive ownership of commodities and natural resources makes for excessive wealth for the few. The question is whether to the average man has been given a fair change to get his share of the nation's wealth. The reason that the conservation movement is going to win is that it is a moral issue. Conservation means the application of common sense to the control of natural resources, but behind all that, the thing that makes conservation worth while is that it means the preservation of common human rights for all the people."

The House committee on interstate and foreign commerce has struck out from the Administration railroad bill the provisos relative to the acquisition of competing lines by railroad companies. One of these provisos was that a railroad on acquiring half the stock of a competing line could purchase the remainder. The regulation of the purchase of competing lines, they say, should be left to the Sherman anti-trust law, which is drastic enough to cover all cases. The other proviso excluded electric railroads from the operation of section twelve, which prohibits railroads from acquiring stock in competing lines. The two provisions struck from the bill were suggested by the railroad presidents at a meeting with President Taft at the White House.

The Northern Pacific Company, in the United States supreme court, has won its case against the requirement of the interestate commerce commission that it join with other railroads in establishign a through passenger route and joint rates from the East to Puget Sound territory via Portland, Ore. It based its refusal on the claim that it had already provided a satisfactory and reasonable route via Billings, Mont. The court held that the reasons assigned by the the commission as to why the Northern Pacific route was not a satisfactory or reasonable one could only be maintained by giving the words of the statute an artificial meaning.

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