Jasper County Democrat, Volume 10, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 May 1907 — WASHINGTON LETTER. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON LETTER.

Political and General Gossip of the National Capital. Special Correspondence to The Democrat. Last week was a lively week for Washington from a social and spectacular standpoint. The visiting naval officers at Jamestown have been entertained at the White House and at the several embassies, and there has been a constant succession of liberty parties of foreign sailors in Washington from the various foreign warships visiting the exposition. The officers nave been always in citizens clothes on the street so they were not conepicious. But the sailors have been in the uniforms of the navies to which they belonged. One has run across them in the hotel lobbies, on the street oars and at the theaters constantly, There is not so much difference between the uniforms of sailors the world over, only minor points, such as buttons and pipings. But it would seem there had never been so many sailors in the city before, and the cap ribbons show them to be from Great Britain, Austria, Germany, Italy and France and possibly some other countries. They have all been models of deportment and have added to the gaiety of the street scenes. Receptions and dinners have been given the officers at the German, British and Austrian embassies, and there are more entertainments in prospect.

There is every prospect that the Dominican Treaty against which such a fight was made in the last session of congress will be ratified by Santo Domingo in the course of a few days. The event is awaited with a good deal of interest at the State Department and it will mean several years more of work for this government in straightening out the finances of the little republic and putting it on its feet again among the nations of the world, One of the changes that will follow the ratification of the treaty is that Minister Dawson of Santo Domingo, who has engineered the negotiations all through and who has visited this country three times in the interest of the treaty, will be transferred to Columbia as minister in succession to |John Barrett, now the director of the Bureau of American Republics. This will be a decided promotion, and is given in recognition of Minister Dawson’s work.

Of decided interest to the traveling public is the decision of the Interstate Commerce Commission that the Railroads cannot grant special rates to theatrical troupes as has been the custom in the past. The decision may or may not affect all of the traveling public. That is as the railroads take it. The present law provides that there shall be no discrimination in passenger rates, and it is held that there is discrimination if the railroads allow a special rate to theatrical organizations and not to other associations of people. If the theatrical rate is kept in force, then an association of ten or more other persons of any calling can demand and receive the same treatment. This will be nice for the traveling public, and will be apt to make co-operative traveling the fashion. *

There is quite a crowding at the counter for the position of Commissioner of Patents that will be left vacant by the resignation of the present Commissioner Frederick I. Allen. Many of the candidates are patent lawyers from various parts of the country, and while naturally a patent lawyer would be of some advantage in the place, being familiar with the details of the business, it would give a decided advantage to his firm to have the prestige of one of its members as Patent Commissioner at Washington. It is rather a delicate situation. Patent lawyers have been appointed to the place before, and while they have of course nominally severed their connection with their firms, they have sometimes continued unofficially connected with them. There is on record the case of one commissioner who used to go every evening to his office near the Patent Office and prepare cases that he would have to pass on in hie capacity of commissioner the next day. •It is likely that a selection will be made from inside the Patent Office, and it is thought that Secretary Garfield who now has the Interior Portfolio, will appoint the present Assistant Commissioner Edward B. Moore to the vacancy. . ttt 7 ■ 3 Postmaster General Cortelyou has just appointed a commission pursuant of an order from the last Congress, which will have the

job of weighing every piece of mail matter and keeping track of the expense involved in haijßling it for. the next six months. It has been contended for years that the railroads were getting too much for the service of transporting the mails. But at the same time there was no accurate data on which to base a calculation. There was always a slight deficit in the postal revenues, but it was hard to locate it and say whether the railroads were getting too much for their work or whether some class of mail matter was paying less than its fair share of the expense. Of course there are many different sorts of mail matter, letters, papers and periodicals, newspapers sent out by the publishers and paid for by the pound, government books and documents that pay nothing at all. and a great mass of franked Congressional congressional correspondence. All these various classes of matter will be weighed and an account kept of the cost of transporting them, and as the result of this exhaustive inquiry, a general readjustment will be made of postage rates and railway mail pay.

The Bureau of Corporations is hard at work on the investigation of the so called Lumber Trust. Little can be learned of the progress of the investigation, but it is said that some remarkable facts are likely to be brought out. One of the most striking things in the whole inquiry is the fact that no one knows for certain that there is a lumber trust or who its moving spirit is. There is no doubt about the identity of the men behind the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Beef Trust and the Coal Trust. But though it is almost certain that there is a lumber trust, and that prices are fixed and penalties for violation of these rules imposed, its management has so far managed to escape identification. This element of mystery lends zest to the chase and there certainly will be some interesting revelations when the report of the Bureau of Corporations is made public, which it will be in the course of the next few months.