ITEMS OF INTEREST December 16, 1911 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

The fifteenth annual report of the secretary of agriculture begins with a series of trenchant statements of national importance. It says: The consumer pays a dollar for food. The farmer gets less than fifty cents of it. Who gets the rest? After years of experimentation we find we can grow Egyptian cotton in southern California and bulbs in the state of Washington. The finest dates from the Sahara desert succeed in our Southwest. Seven hundred and fifty million dollars is the best estimate for poultry products this year. The day is not far distant when we will cease to import potash. Alaska will some day provide farmers in lower latitudes with grain seeds superior to what they can grow at home. The corn crop is moving northward by seed selection. There is great promise in the fact that whole classes of graduates of agricultural colleges go back to the farms, having learned how to make them profitable. Our foresters are learning by experiments how to reforest thirty thousand acres in a year; ten times as much must be planted annually to cover all the bare acres in a generation. There should be publicity regarding the cold storage of foods, through monthly reports to some federal authority that would give them to the press, to the end that the people might know to what extent foods are being withdrawn from consumption.

One year ago the Kansas Legislature passed a law requiring that before any stock or bond certificate could be sold in that state the seller must obtain a permit and certificate from the banking department of the state. In order to obtain that permit the financial starding, organization, plans, and operations of the company whose stock or bonds are to be sold, must be presented to the banking department and be passed upon. Out of over five hundred requests made in ten months since the law went into effect, only forty-four have been granted. One mining promoter is in jail for trying to sell stock without a permit. The banking department of Kansas estimates that already it can see a saving of from four to eight millions of dollars yearly to the people of Kansas who had been mulcted by dishonest promoters of fiat stock certificate property.

The interstate commerce commission has declared its assumption of jurisdiction over the practices of a railroad or railroads, constituting a through route, "affecting the right of the shipper to safe and speedy transportation of his freight." The railroad's defense was that if it allowed its cars to go to lines outside its system the cars would be confiscated and it would not have sufficient equipment to conduct its local business. The commission holds "that the temporary confiscation by carriers of the cars of other railroads, and the placing of embargoes against cars being sent off of the lines of the owners, are alike unlawful, and the railroads are expected to make such rules for the return of cars as will terminate such abuses."

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