ITEMS OF INTEREST December 7, 1912 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Political campaign material transmitted free through the mails accounted, according to post-office department records, for the difference between a postal surplus and a postal deficit for the last fiscal year ending June 30. An account of franked mail forwarded for Congress, the executive departments, and other government establishments, shows that postage at the ordinary rate on this matter would have netted the government nearly twenty million dollars. About three million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of this would have been paid on political documents. The postal service handled during the year 310,245,000 pieces of franked mail, weighing 61,377,000 pounds. In the presidential and congressional primary campaign in the last quarter of the fiscal year, it is computed that the total weight of franked mail was between seven and eight million pounds, all of which was transmitted as first class.

Official notice is given that the postoffice department is about to issue a special series of postage-stamps in commemoration of the Panama-Pacific exposition, to be placed on sale in January, 1913. These stamps measure about three fourths by one and one sixteenth inches. At the top appear the words "U. S. Postage" and "San Francisco, 1915." In the left-hand border is a branch of laurel and in the right-hand border a palm branch. The one-cent stamp is green, and in the center appears, within a circle, a bust of Balboa. The two-cent stamp is red. It represents the Gatun locks of the Panama canal. The five-cent stamp is blue, and represents the Golden Gate of San Francisco harbor. The ten-cent stamp is dark yellow. The subject is "Discovery of San Francisco Bay."

The national grange at its meeting in Spokane, Wash., rejected the Brauer plan for a ten-million-dollar corporation for direct cooperative marketing of farm products. In place of the Brauer plan the grange indorsed a plan for state and national bureaus of information as the first step toward cooperative marketing of farm products. By this plan each state grange will establish a bureau through which subordinate granges can keep informed as to marketing conditions. A resolution indorsing the Senate bill providing for a bureau of markets in the department of agriculture was adopted.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

ITEMS OF INTEREST

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access