ITEMS OF INTEREST July 19, 1913 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Bids have been received by the forest service for three hundred million feet of timber advertised for sale on the Tongass national forest in Alaska, and an additional three hundred million feet from the same forest has been applied for. A large part of this timber is Sitka spruce, which will be make into paper pulp, not only for the Pacific coast and the Orient, but for the general pulp market. The latest estimates available show that there is a stand of approximately seventy billion feet on the Tongass national forest, and approximately twenty-eight billion feet on the Chugach national forest in Alaska. The annual cut on the Tongass forest has gradually increased from zero at its creation in 1902, until it amounted to approximately forty-three million feet in the year 1912. All of this has been cut for local uses, largely for boxes to contain canned salmon. On the area on the Stikeen river, for which bids have been reveived the species to be cut include Sitka spruce, hemlock, red cedar, cottonwood, and yellow cedar, and the minimum stumpage rates range from two dollars and a half to one dollar a thousand feet, according to species, the yellow cedar bringing the highest price. A cutting period of twenty years will be allowed, with two years additional for construction work. The prices may be adjusted at five-year intervals to take care of possible advances in lumber values.

In an effort to end the prolonged ice strike, which has caused much suffering in Cincinnati, Ohio, Mayor Henry T. Hunt seized seven of the large non-union ice-making plants as a result of the refusal of the ice manufacturers to arbitrate with their striking employees. The formal seizure of the plants was ordered by the board of health in the interests of the city. Mayor Hunt gave the ice-makers a certain time within which either to operate the plants or to turn them over to the city. The manufacturers declared that they would do neither, and threatened injunction proceedings. The police seized the plants, and union officials then ordered engineers and firemen back to their former jobs, when work was immediately resumed. The first step by the ice manufacturers to regain possession of their plants was taken by the Cincinnati Ice Company, which applied to Judge Spiegel in the common pleas court for an injunction to restrain the city "from trespassing further on the property of the company." The petition asked that a temporary injunction be granted, and that it be made permanent. Mayor Hunt has sent a message to Attorney-General McReynolds urging him to order an investigation of the Middle State Ice Producers' Exchange, claiming that it is a combination in restraint of trade.

The interstate commerce commission, in the report on its investigation of the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad and its allied roads, vigorously condemned their handling of affairs. The commission's conclusions are, that the "outside" financial management has been "wasteful in the extreme;" that had the New Haven confined itself to actual railroad activities under the same conditions that prevailent in other respects, "it could have paid a dividend of 8 per cent for the fiscal year 1912 and carried nearly two million dollars to surplus account, instead of showing a deficit of nearly a million dollars that the New Haven's agreement with the Boston & Albany is "violative of the spirit of the statute against the restraint of competition and should be canceled;" that "in our opinion this line should be kept entirely free from New Haven control;" that the New Haven should divest itself of its trolley lines, not because the present ownership is in violation of law, but because such ownership might be used to prevent the building of competing lines in the future; that the Boston & Maine merger with the New Haven, if permitted to stand, will result in "an almost exclusive monopoly of transportation facilities by railroad in the greater part of New England."

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