ITEMS OF INTEREST September 28, 1912 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

All thirty-three so-called Cunningham Alaska coal land claims, involving alleged fraudulent blanket patents which contributed to the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, have been disposed of finally by the interior department. The appeals have been adversely decided and Secretary Fisher has directed the immediate execution of the decision of Commissioner Dennett of the general land office, who held the claims were improperly allowed and that the entries should be canceled. Secretary Fisher took this final action on his second review of the cases. No more of the real Cunningham claims are pending, though the interior department is regularly passing upon other Alaskan claims somewhat similar to those of the Cunningham group. Of a thousand or more of such three hundred already have been disallowed. The Cunningham claim had an aggregate area of fifty-two hundred acres and their value ran high into the millions. It had been alleged that a Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate owned the blanket claims of the Cunninghams and their associates. With the controversy over the claims came the dismissal from public service of former Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, Louis R. Glavis, a chief of the field division of the land office, and several minor officials.

Admiral Andrews, acting secretary of the navy, has made public the revised list of the vessels which will comprise the great fleet to be reviewed by President Taft Oct. 15 in New York harbor. It will be by far the largest naval force ever agthered together in American waters. The one hundred and twentyseven ships in the reviewing line will have a total tonnage of 741,590. There will be thirty-two battleships aggregating 491,508 tons; four armored cruisers, 58,000 tons; four protected cruisers, 15,663 tons; twenty-one special type ships, 61,993 tons; six naval militia vessels, 4,581 tons; eight tons; eight fuel ships, 88,385 tons; twenty-six destroyers, destroyers, 18,431 tons; sixteen torpedo boats, 3,029 tons, and ten submarines.

Promotion for thirteen thousand railway postal clerks on Oct. I will be provided in orders by Postmaster-General Hitchcock. In the railway mail service there are sixteen thousand seven hundred clerks, and a majority of those not promoted on Oct. I will receive more pay before the end of the current fiscal year. Although more than one million dollars a year will be involved in the increases, it will cost the government no more, as the postmaster-general has perfected a plan to save that amount by a rearrangement of railway mail-car space and the amount the government pays annually to the railroads.

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