Jasper County Democrat, Volume 10, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1907 — WASHINGTON LETTER. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON LETTER.

Political and General Gossip of the National Capital. Special Correspondence to The Democrat. Since the whrk of the Reclamamation Service has done so much for the arid region west of the 100th meridian, there have been a number of suggestions about doing something on approximately the same line for the east. The Reclamation Service so far has dealt with desert lands, putting the water on them. It has reclaimed hundreds of thousands of acres of desert and the increased price that land sells for to the settlers has furnished more money to reclaim more land. So that by„ the time the government gets through with the 50,000,000 or so acres of land which there is water to irrigate, the work will have paid for itself and there will be an empire added to the area of the United States.

But there is another problem on the same line so far as reclaiming land is concerned but diametrically opposed to it in the matter of water. That is in draining the swamp land of the country and getting rid of enough of the water to make the soil available for agriculture and homesteads. A report on the subject has just been rendered by J. O. Wright of the Department of Agriculture and some of the facts shown are startling. The swamp land area of the United States that is waiting to be reclaimed is 77,000,000 acres. The most of this lies in the middle north, along the Atlantic Coast or in the Southern States. It is an area bigger than England,lreland, Scotland and Wales, bigger also than the whole of New England, New York and a part of Pennsylvania. A good deal of this land has been drained by private enterprise and it has been shown that when drained it is the finest agricultural land in the world. The matter of draining is simple, much simpler than reclaiming land for irrigation, for all that is needed is a comprehensive system of canals and ditches and the water flows off by itself, The cost of draining this immense area by the most approved modern methods would be abouta billion dollars, but the land itself would be worth four billions when reclaimed whereas now it is worth nothing. It would furnish forty acre farms for 1,900,000 families, and the work, like the irrgation, could be done gradually and made to pay for itself. Mr. Wright makes no recommendations in his report as to whether the work should be done under federal or state authority, The draining can easily be done by the individual states without interfering with each other. In this it is different from irrigation where frequently a river runs through more than one state and where the federal government is the only authority that can well handle and adjust the claims between the states. It is a fascinating problem, this draining of the swamps—adding to the national wealth, adding to the available home area of the country and largely wiping out malaria and mosquitoes in the process. How soon the work will be undertaken on a large scale, it is impossible to say, but it is something that would cost practically nothing and should be done at once.

t t’t The railroad commissioners who have been holding their convention here this week are confronted with a problem. They are well content to let the Interstate Commerce Commission deal with the inteiniaie ilroraad problem, but they concerned with th e intra-state roads and they want some method whereby the interstate and the intra-state earnings of the roads can be separated and shown in different reports. This is a delicate and complex problem in bookkeeping and one about which the commissioners are not at all decided, so if anyone can come forward with a cheap and easy solution of it, they would be glad to hear from him. ttt

The question of oil burning in warships has been studied by the Navy Department for some years. They have watched the progress that has been made abroad in this line and after seeing all that has been done and watching a good many experiments taken up and abandoned, they have gone into the business with a view of meeting American conditions. One reason that nothing definite has been accomplished heretofore is that coal has been much cheaper than oil on the Atlantic coast so there was not the motive of economy. But now that the battleship squadron is going to the Pacific where the cost problem is reversed, there is likelihood of more being done. The Monitor Wyoming which is now at the

Mare Island Yard in San Francisco, is being fitted for oil burning The work on her will be completed before the battleship squadron reaches the Pacific and she will be given sea trials under service conditions. The new 20,000 ton battleships, the Delaware and the North Dakota, are being planned touseoilas an auxiliary fuel. They will be able to carry 350 tons of oil in their double bottoms and this will be equal to about 600 tons of added coal capacity. This will give them altogether a steaming radius of abobt 7,000 miles, meaning that they could go 25 days at cruising speed without recoaling. It is not likely that oil will ever be used as the sole fuel for any except perhaps some of the torpedo boats and destroyers, but with the coal, it helps out the consumption greatly and in a forced draft emergency, -it will crowd up the steam as coal alone cannot possibly do. Ip the same connection, it may be said that the Navy Department has looked with the greatest interest on the performance of the Lusitania which has just broken all trans-Atlantic records. The Louisiana is a turbine ship and the layman will naturally ask why if the turbine produces such high speed in a trans-Atlantic liner, should it not be a good thing for the new warships also? The Navy Department has taken this seriously into consideration in planning the new big battleships, but the feature of the turbine is that while it is good for high speeds, it is wasteful and unsatisfactory for low speed?. The most of a warship’s traveling is done at what is termed “cruising speed,” and this is too slow for the economical use of the turbine. So in planning the new ships, the Department has arranged to have them fitted with ordinary reciprocating engines and with auxilary turbines so that in the pinch of battle when the highest speed is required, the turbines can be brought into play and the monster ships can be speeded up to the extreme limit. They will be the finest ships in the world when fitted with both types of engines.