ITEMS OF INTEREST August 12, 1911 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

A bill has been introduced in Congress by the chairman of the public lands committee, providing for leasing of Alaska coal lands, designed as the basis of conservation legislation and to prevent coal land monopoly. It fixes a minimum royalty of one cent per ton for low grade coal and three cents for high grade coal. It leaves the maximum royalty limitless. The same bill was introduced in the Senate by Mr. Works of California. Under its terms no lessee is to be permitted more than five thousand one hundred and twenty acres nor to lease the land for more than thirty years. In addition to the royalty, the government is to receive a rental for the land, amounting to twenty-five cents an acre the first year, fifty cents an acre the second year, and one dollar an acre for each year thereafter.

Requested by the attorney-general of Texas to give a report of his company's affairs in that state, the vice-president of the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company replies that the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Bell Telephone Company have entered into an unlawful combination in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas to stifle competition, and that the Postal Company has not only suffered, but the general public has been deprived of the benefits of competition in telegraphy, and that scores of cities have been subject since June 26 to the domination arising from the control of telegraph and telephone wires by the Western Union Company.

President Taft has signed a proclamation reducing the area of the petrified forest national park, Arizona, from ninety-five to forty square miles. This reduction is made on the recommendation of the head curator of geology of the National Museum, who has just made an examination of the land for the interior department. He says in his report that outside of the new boundaries there is practically nothing worth preserving. Two large tracts within the park are also marked off from which museums and others authorized by the secretary of the interior may take specimens of the silicified woods.

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