Items of Interest May 16, 1914 Issue

Items of Interest

Figures have been compiled from public documents to prove that the actual cost of war between nations in the nineteenth century amounted in all to forty thousand millions of dollars. That sum of money would buy the French nation complete. Everything that the French people possess,—lands, houses, shops, ships, gold, silver, jewels, mines, merchandise,—everything that thirty-nine million Frenchmen possess could be duplicated for the sum of money spent by the world on war in a single century. Such a sum would buy the German empire entire. It would purchase the great Russian empire and leave five billion dollars to spare. It would buy everything possessed by Italy, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland, and leave six billion dollars to spare. This sum is equivalent to nearly one-half of all the wealth possessed by the United States.

The growing importance of the French-African colonial empire has led to serious consideration as to whether or not there should be created a new department for the colonies of North Africa with a minister having the sole direction of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, of which so large a percentage of the population is white. At the present time each colony is directed by a separate minister. Tunis comes under the minister of foreign affairs, Algeria the minister of the interior, Morocco the minister of war, and Central Africa the minister of the colonies. This anomaly largely accounts for much of the existing difficulty in dealing with French colonial administration in northern Africa by blocking the way to the needed reforms.

In 1905 the timber sold from the United States national forests aggregated ninety-six million board feet, which brought the government no more than eighty-five thousand dollars. Three years later the amount of timber sold increased to nearly three hundred and ninety million board feet, and the money received rose to seven hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. In 1911, eight hundred and thirty million board feet sold for more than two million dollars, and in 1913 more than two billion feet brought in contracts amounting to four million five hundred thousand dollars. Not all this money was received in any one year, because national forest timber is sold on contracts which range from one to twenty-five years, and it is paid for as cut.

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