Items of Interest August 4, 1917 Issue

Items of Interest

Plans for cutting a ship canal across Scotland, connecting the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean by a voyage of a little more than sixty miles, are advocated. The canal would reduce the distance from Glasgow to important points as follows: to Leith, 485 miles; to London, 253 miles; to Hamburg, 312 miles. The saving between various points would be: Liverpool and Leith, 400 miles; Leith and Belfast, 377 miles; Liverpool and the Elbe, 288 miles; Glasgow and Antwerp, 290 miles. Two rival routes for the canal are being discussed. One would follow an existing barge canal. The other would start from Alloa on the Forth and make directly for Loch Lomond across land which is never more than fifty feet above sea level.

In the case of the semibituminous coal operators and companies in Virginia and West Virginia, on trial charged with violation of the Sherman anti-trust law, the jury on July 12 brought in a verdict of not guilty for all the defendants. It deliberated twenty-three hours and a half before reaching the verdict which freed forty-one operators and sixty-nine corporations from the Government's charges. The trial began June 18, when the charges included sixty-four individuals and 108 corporations; but as the trial progressed indictments against a number of the defendants were dismissed.

Iowa led the United States in 1916 in the number of motor cars registered in proportion to the population. That state had one car for every eleven persons. California was second, with one car to every twelve inhabitants; Nebraska and South Dakota had one for every thirteen; Arkansas one for every 116. The average for the United States is one car for every twenty-nine persons. The New England states averaged one car to about every twenty-seven persons. The prosperous corn belt states showed a fairly uniform distribution of cars.

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