Items of Interest

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The Illinois supreme court, in the case of the state against the Illinois Central railroad in the endeavor to recover back taxes, holds that the charter agreement of 1851, under which the railroad was to pay the state five per cent of its gross earnings, is a contract, and that the five per cent is not a tax in the legal sense.
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Plans for an outer harbor in Chicago, that will take care of freight and passenger business both, are being prepared.
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Radical reforms in judicial procedure were considered by the American Bar Association at its thirty-third annual convention at Chattanooga, Tenn.
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Definite standards of safety appliances to be attached to railway cars and locomotives finally have been agreed upon after nearly a third of a century of effort.
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Secretary of the Interior Ballinger has restored to the public domain one hundred and fifty thousand acres of the land which was temporarily withdrawn in 1908 and 1909 for the purpose of creating the Alabama national forest.
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Iowa farmers have been arranging for drainage improvements in their low lands at a cost of about three hundred and seven million dollars.
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As a sequence of the legislative investigation of the bribery charges against a former state senator, the affairs of the New York state forest fish and game commission have been undergoing a merciless probing by the committee appointed by Governor Hughes.
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The National Association of Supervisors of State Banks held a three-days convention at Washington last week.
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The membership of the commission authorized by Congress to make an investigation of control of stock and bond issues by concerns engaged in interstate commerce, as announced, is composed of President Arthur Hadley of Yale, chairman; Frederic N.
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Ex-President Roosevelt, on his speaking tour through the West, has declared himself in favor of these doctrines: Elimination of special interests from politics; complete and effective publicity of corporation affairs; passage of laws prohibiting the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; government supervision of the capitalization not only of public service corporations, but of all corporations, but of all corporations doing an interstate business; personal responsibility of officers and directors of corporations that break the law; increased power of the federal bureau of corporations and the interstate commerce commission to control industry more effectively; revision of the tariff, one schedule at a time, on the basis of information furnished by an expert tariff commission; graduated income tax and graduated inheritance tax; readjustment of the country's financial system in such a way as to prevent repetition of periodical financial panics; maintenance of an efficient army and a navy large enough to insure the respect of other nations as a guarantee of peace; use of national resources for the benefit of all the people; extension of the work of the departments of agriculture, of the national and state governments, and of agricultural colleges and experiment stations, so as to take in all phases of life on the farm; regulation of the terms and conditions of labor, by means of comprehensive workmen's compensation acts, state and national laws to regulate child labor and the work of women, enforcement of better sanitation conditions for workers, and extension of the use of safety appliances in industry and commerce, both in and between the states; clear division of authority between the national and the various state governments; direct primaries, associated with corrupt practices acts; publicity of campaign contributions not only after, but before election; prompt removal of unfaithful and incompetent public servants; provisions against the performance of any service for interstate corporations or the reception of any compensation from such corporations by national officers.
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Before the year's outing season is over nearly half a million persons will have sought recreation and health in the national forests of the United States.
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More than two thirds of the work required to bring water to Los Angeles, Cal.