National.

Encouraged by its success in its campaign for the national pure food law, the International Stewards Association is now planning for a hotel training school and promotion of the movement to protect consumers against short weight and measurement in the purchase of goods sold in containers. The purpose of the proposed hotel training school, which will be located at Indianapolis, Ind., is to prepare the prospective steward, chef, baker, hotel clerk, and housekeeper to become proficient in their chosen trade or profession by installing in them business morals, building up character so that they may understand that the first requisite of success is honesty in the handling of food materials and other property belonging to employers. Practical courses of instruction will be offered in all the departments of hotel and restaurant economy. The school will also furnish training to men actually engaged in the business. Once completed and equipped, the hotel training school will represent a property valuation of $500,000. Most of the equipment has been subscribed by manufacturing firms, who will furnish their latest product as advertisement.

Of the 60,000 post offices of all classes in the United States, it is reported that approximately 50,000 eventually will be designated as postal savings depositories. The total number of postal banks created is now over 1600. By Sept. 1 all the 1800 second class post offices will have been designated as postal banks. It is the intention of the post office department then to begin designating the 6000 third class offices as banks, probably at the rate of 500 a week. Gradually the system will be extended to offices of the fourth class, including only those which are money-order offices. At about ten thousand fourth class offices money orders are not issued.

Representative Littleton of New York has introduced in the House a bill for a commission to investigate the question of regulating by legislation the transaction of business by industrial and corporate concerns engaged in interstate commerce. He believes that the Sherman antitrust law is defective and that Congress, after due inquiry into conditions, should set about making up its deficiencies. The commission he proposes is to be called the industrial and corporate commission. It would be composed of five members of the Senate, five of the House, and five members outside of Congress to be selected by the President.

While the program for the annual conference of the governors of the states of the Union has not been completed, it is stated by former Gov. J. Franklin Fort, of New Jersey, who is chairman of the reception committee, that from acceptances received already, the indications are that it will be the largest conference that has been held since the first one called several years ago by former President Roosevelt. Thirty of the executives have already stated that they will be at the gathering, which meets at the New Monmouth Hotel, Spring Lake, N. J., on Tuesday, Sept. 12, and which will last until the sixteenth.

Attorney General Wickersham has been notified that the lawyers for the so-called electrical trust are about ready to go before the United States courts and enter a judgment dissolving the combination of which the government complains in a suit now pending. An agreement has been reached with the department of justice, after much negotiation, which is expected to give to the government a complete victory without a trial in court. The department of justice has been informed that the electrical pools all over the country, against which it was about to proceed, have been dissolved.

The national monetary commission, of which former Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island is chairman, must wind up its affairs by Jan. 8 next, if the House takes favorable action on the measure recently passed by the Senate, limiting the commission's life to that date. The action followed a storm of criticism that recently broke in the Senate over the commission's delay in making a report and its alleged extravagance.

The cost of the proposed new charter to New York city by increases in salaries and by new positions it would make mandatory would be $4,289,500. Of this amount $3,579,000 would be necessary for mandatory raises in the pay of a number of city officers and employees, from the mayor down, the greatest single item being the increase in the budget of the board of education for teachers' salaries.

Styling their crime mean and insidious, their greed despicable, and their methods merciless, Judge Rosalsky sentenced thirteen members of the New York Live Poultry Merchants' Protective Association to three months in the penitentiary and payment of fines of five hundred dollars on their conviction of a charge of conspiracy to control the live poultry market.

President Taft in a special message to the House of Representatives vetoed the joint resolution providing for the admission of new Mexico and Arizona to statehood. His reason for exercising the executive power of veto was based on his thorough disapproval of the recall of judges clause in the Arizona constitution.

There is left at present, for continuing the work in raising the Maine in the harbor of Havana, about $150,000 of the $650,000 appropriated for that purpose. It is estimated that $250,000 more will be required to complete the work and fully expose the hulk of the battleship now covered with mud.

Plans for the dissolution of the so-called powder trust are under consideration between Attorney General Wickersham and the president of the E. J. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company, which was recently adjudged by the United States circuit court to be in violation of the Sherman antitrust law.

The purchase of a tract of fifty-six acres, a part of which fronts on the Thames river, as a site for the Connecticut College for Women at New London, Conn., has been authorized at a meeting of the board of trustees of the college.

Complete figures show an increase of nearly $100,000,000 in the value of Chicago real estate for the year 1911 over the assessed value of 1910. The total value this year is $575,528,517.

An investigation of the election of United States Senator Isaac Stephenson of Wisconsin has been directed in a resolution passed by the Senate.

International.

According to the report of the registrar of joint stock companies in Bengal quite a number of purely Indian companies were started during the past year. These included six insurance companies, two banks, one railway, and one cooperative association, two printing companies, two dairy concerns, and two leather and tanning concerns. As the native of India is in the habit of hoarding his wealth, the fact that such companies have been started is considered a matter for congratulation, indicating that some of this hoarded wealth is going to support native enterprises and showing that the natives of India have confidence in the integrity and enterprise of their own countrymen.

Changes in the tax system of the city of St. John, N. B., were recommended by the committee on the mayor's inaugural address in a report to the council this week. The reduction of the tax on improvements by twenty-five per cent is advised, the deficiency in the assessment to be made up by the placing of a tax on land. This applies only to the first year, after which a further reduction of twenty-five per cent per year on improvements and a corresponding increase in land taxation is recommended, until the tax on improvements altogether disappears.

By a vote of 241 to 128, the House of Commons passed a resolution appropriating $1,260,000 for the payment of members' salaries for the coming year. This action was taken pursuant to the resolution passed Aug. 10, providing for an annual salary of $2000 for each member of the House of Commons. This is a radical departure from the principle of gratuitous public service which hitherto prevailed in the Commons.

The Irish leaders in Parliament are quite confident, since the passage of the veto bill, that the way is now open to home rule for Ireland.

The census for the union of South Africa shows a population of all races of 5,938,499, of whom only 1,278,025 are whites.

Industrial and Commercial.

The popularity of the motor-bicycle is increasing at such an unusual and unexpectedly rapid rate, and so many orders are being received by the numerous motor-cycle manufacturing firms in Coventry, Eng., that practically all of them are obliged to work overtime. Some of the firms have already promised the whole of their output for the next year. The total output of motor-bicycles from Coventry and Birmingham is estimated at one thousand per week, and it is expected that the number of bicycles will amount to one hundred thousand on the register when the next returns are announced, showing an increase of forty thousand over the number registered two years ago.

The success of the Kaiser Wilhelm canal, which connects the North sea and the Baltic, with Kiel as its eastern terminus, from a commercial as well as strategic point of view, is shown by the official returns for the year 1910-1911. In all 45,569 ships, with a net holding of 7,580,000 tons, used the canal, while the resulting revenue amounted to $875,000. Since 1899, reckoning by the ships' tonnage, canal traffic has doubled, and returns have correspondingly increased.

Constantinople is about to rebuild the section recently destroyed by fire and has advertised for bids for the construction of ten thousand houses. The United States consul at the Turkish capital says an excellent opportunity is thus presented to American contractors. Both the departments of state and of commerce and labor are interesting themselves in laying the matter before them.

The agricultural statistics for the western division of states and territories, which includes Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, show, according to the late census, that values during the ten years have appreciated over two hundred per centum, and that large holdings have been cut up into small farms.