261 
Tl-IE RtlRAb NEW-YORKER 
an advocate of better economic condi¬ 
tions in the distribution of food prod¬ 
ucts, and this made him an advocate of 
the commission bill. 
Great pressure will be brought to bear 
on the members of the Legislature by 
this organized, and apparently well 
financed, opposition, but we beg to re¬ 
mind any wavering members of the 
Legislature that there are more pro¬ 
ducers and consumers than there are 
middlemen in the various exchanges 
handling agricultural products, and con¬ 
sequently more votes for succeeding 
elections. A careful analysis of the 
votes in opposition to this bill will be 
made and recorded and we promise the 
members of our Legislature that they 
will have to face the record of their 
vote on this bill in the future. If any 
members from producing or consuming 
sections—and that comes pretty nearly 
including the majority of them—wish to 
face their constituents, who are already 
crying out against the high cost of liv¬ 
ing, with a record against this bill, the 
responsibility will rest upon themselves. 
“DAN RIVER COAL" PROSPECTS. 
A couple of years ago we did our best 
to head off a scheme for exploiting the 
“Dan River Coal fields." It has been 
known for a century that deposits of 
coal and of black shale are found along 
EVENTS OF THE WEEK. 
DOMESTIC.—Books, plants, seeds, bulbs, 
and roots are henceforth to be carried in 
the mails as fourth class matter under 
amendments proposed by Senator Hoke 
Smith February 5 to the post office appro¬ 
priation bill. 
The Pennsylvania House of Representa¬ 
tives February 5 passed a resolution for an 
amendment to the State Constitution to 
permit women to vote. The resolution now 
goes to the Senate. If passed by the 
Legislature it will require the approval of 
the 1915 Legislature before being submitted 
to the people. The measure passed by a 
vote of 131 to 70. 
The Indiana State Senate February G sus¬ 
pended the constitutional rule requiring bills 
and resolutions to be considered on three 
separate days and adopted the joint reso¬ 
lution ratifying the proposed amendment 
to the Constitution of the United States for 
the election of Senators by popular vote. 
There were no votes cast against it. 
Hemmed in on all sides by ice from 10 
to 15 feet thick and with practically no 
chance of release for many days, the Good¬ 
rich steamer Alabama lay February 6 about 
1,000 feet off the Muskegon, Mich., harbor 
Government piers. Forty-eight persons were 
on board. They had enough fuel and pro¬ 
visions to last two or three weeks. 
Navigation on the Hudson River closed 
February 6, when the steamer Rensselaer 
of the Hudson Navigation Company left 
Albany for New York on its 317th trip for 
the 1912 season. On the trip the vessel 
s/o 
PRIZES FOR PHOTOGRAPHS 
The Rural New-Yorker will give $50—divided as above for the 
Three Best Original Photographs illustrating scenes in our new book 
“THE CHILD” 
This book is full of pathetic or dramatic situations which afford opportunity 
for effective grouping of characters to form illustrations. Here are a few: 
‘‘Childless and alone” Ike Barber’s cider mill 
The Elder and The Child 
Shep and his new friend 
“Sunday comes in the middle of the week” 
First lesson in milking 
Hiram Bently’s anger 
Hen Bingham’s atonement 
“Borryin’ a boy” 
Advertising with cider apples 
Bill King’s heme run 
Joe Burgess and his song 
Mr. Cabot of the Austin Cabots 
“Mother” and the Child 
These and other scenes will form effective groupings for pictures, and the 
characters may be found right in your home neighborhood. You are to 
arrange the groups to suit yourself. The prizes will be awarded to the 
pictures which most nearly carry out the idea of the book. Each contest¬ 
ant may send 6 pictures but no individual can win more than one prize. 
Suitable pictures not winning prizes will be paid for. Others will be 
promptly returned on receipt of postage. 
The Pictures Must be in Our Hands April 1, 1913 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
NEW YORK 
1913. 
SIXTEEN COMMERCIAL ORGANIZATIONS 
TO OPPOSE THE ROOSEVELT BILL. 
This morning one of the largest delega¬ 
tions of business men ever organized in 
New York to protest against proposed leg¬ 
islation affecting commercial interest leaves 
for Albany, where it will appear in op¬ 
position to the Roosevelt bill. It will go 
by specially chartered train carrying a 
dining car for the convenience of those 
who may have not had time to get break¬ 
fast before starting and will have two 
such cars on the return trip for dinner 
provision. The publicity committee of the 
various fruit and produce trade exchanges 
and associations has been active for several 
days past and up to noon yesterday had 
issued tickets to more than 250 applicants. 
This committee is not confining itself to 
organizing local opposition. Under instruc¬ 
tions it has sent live and active represen¬ 
tatives into various cities and districts of 
the State to impress on both commission 
merchants and shippers the importance of 
giving attention to the bill and realizing 
what it means. The commission men of 
New York see in it as great a menace to 
producers as to themselves,. and are ac¬ 
tively giving warning of the fact. 
The commercial bodies that will be repre¬ 
sented by the delegation include the New 
York Cotton Exchange, the New York 
Produce Exchange, the New York Mercan¬ 
tile Exchange, the New York Fruit Ex¬ 
change, the National League of Commis¬ 
sion Merchants, the New York Fruit & 
Produce Trade Association, the Fruit 
Buyers’ Union, the New York Poultry & 
Game Trade Association, the Dried Fruit- 
men's Association, the Cut Flowers Asso¬ 
ciation, Gansevoort Market Association, 
Wallabout Market Association, the Con¬ 
nolly Auction Company, the Fruit Auction 
Company, Brown & Seccomb and the As¬ 
sociation of Cold Storage Men. Advices 
were received yesterday that a strong dele¬ 
gation would go from Buffalo representing 
the trade organizations there.—City Paper. 
We give the above clipping from a 
daily paper of February 11 to show pro¬ 
ducers the organized opposition to the 
Roosevelt bill for the regulation of the 
commission trade in the State, with 
particular reference to the City of New 
York. The hearing on the bill before 
the Senate Agricultural Committee had 
some dramatic features to it. In the 
midst of his argument against the bill 
ex-Senator Travis was asked by Senator 
Godfrey what he had to say to the 
charge that the commission merchants 
had raised a fund of $6,000 or $8,000 
to defeat the bill. Mr. Travis denied 
any knowledge of it. Later it was 
charged that a fund of $25,000 had been 
collected for the defeat of the bill. It 
was later admitted that a fund of $3,000 
had been raised to defeat the bill. 
There is every reason to expect that this 
bill will be favorably reported to both 
branches of the Legislature, and the 
work of the producers and consumers 
will now be to show their representa¬ 
tives in the Legislature the necessity for 
favorable vote on the bill. The pro¬ 
ducers have conceded every reasonable 
point of objection, and indeed have con¬ 
ceded some points that they would be 
justified in insisting upon retaining, but 
it is desired to give them the benefit of 
every doubt and yet to insist upon some 
measure of redress for the intolerable 
conditions that have so long existed in 
the produce commission trade in the 
City of New York. 
Similar bills have been before the 
Legislature for the last five or six years, 
but such frenzied opposition as has been 
worked up against this bill was not 
known before. This is probably due to 
the fact that this bill gets at the root 
of the evil more directly than any pre¬ 
vious bill, and for the further reason 
that the consumers are now advised and 
aroused on the subject and are insisting 
upon regulation of the trade as well as 
the producers. A fund of $6,000 or 
$8,000, or of $25,000, may raise some 
noise and pay the printing of some hys¬ 
terical literature, but it will not stem 
the tide in favor of a regulation of the 
produce commission business of New 
York City. When the consumer began 
to realize that 65 cents of every dollar 
he pays for produce for his table goes 
to the cost of distribution he became 
the Dan River in North Carolina. This 
region is close to sections where coal is 
needed for fuel. If the coal were there 
these coal beds would prove very 
valuable, for shipment wopld be easy. 
There you have all the elements for a 
promoter’s scheme—leasing lands and 
selling stock! The Geological Survey 
gives such a pleasant game this black 
eye: 
This field has been known for nearly - a 
century, hut there is no record of coal 
produced from it. The bright black car¬ 
bonaceous shale exposed in a number of 
prospects at Walnut Cove is believed by 
some of the residents of that village to 
have coal value, although none of them 
used it. High-grade coal has been found 
in several places in this region in a seam 
ranging from a few inches to a foot in 
thickness, and this fact, together with 
the belief of people in the district that 
black shale is a sign of coal and if fol¬ 
lowed far enough under cover will lead to 
coal, has caused more or less prospecting. 
In 1907 a citizen of Winston-Salem, N. C„ 
spent several thousand dollars in sinking a 
shaft on this carbonaceous bed and a dia¬ 
mond-drill hole at Walnut Cove. His fail¬ 
ure to find a workable coal bed led to a 
request for information from the United 
States Geologieal Survey as to the proba¬ 
bility of the existence of coal in merchant¬ 
able. quantity near Walnut Cove. An ex¬ 
amination of the area made in 1910 by 
Ii. W. Stone, a geologist of the Survey, has 
led to the conclusion that there is no 
reason for expecting to find commercially 
valuable coal beds iu the Dan River dis¬ 
trict. The beds of anthracite in this region 
are merely local deposits, of small lateral 
extent, and only a few’ inches thick. The 
thick bed of carbonaceous shale is value¬ 
less. It is therefore useless, Mr. Stone 
states, to expend money and energy in this 
region in the hope of developing a coal 
mine. 
So cut out Dan River Coal invest¬ 
ments from your dreams of great 
wealth. 
encountered three-inch inch. The previous 
record for navigation goes back to January 
19, 1S10, one year after the first steam 
vessel came up the Hudson. The Nyack 
aud Tarrytown ferryboat Rockland, which 
has broken all records for continuance of 
her trips because of the freedom from ice 
in the Hudson, was obliged to stop the 
same day. Last year' the Rockland made 
her final trip on New Year’s Day. A year 
ago hundreds of people and many automo¬ 
biles crossed the river between Nyack and 
Tarrytown on the ice and kept up that 
travel until the last of February. 
The Depositors Association of the de¬ 
funct Union Bank of Brooklyn has under 
consideration an appeal to the Legislature 
to reimburse the depositors to an extent 
of $3,000,000 for losses Incurred through 
the failure of the institution. The State, 
it is contended, is responsible for the fail¬ 
ure, because the State Banking Depart¬ 
ment had been negligent in its oversight. 
It is asserted that the looting of the bank 
would have been prevented if the Bank¬ 
ing Department had done its duty. 
Fines aggregating $50,000 w’ere imposed 
February 6 by Justice Stafford at Wash¬ 
ington in the Criminal Court on bucketshop 
proprietors. Indicted in April, 1910, Louis 
Celia, Angello Angello and C. A. Tillis, all 
of St. Louis, and Samuel W. Adler of New 
York, w’ere fined $10,000 each. Oscar .T. 
Rappelo of Jersey City was fined $5,000 
and Charles R. Alley of Washington and 
William Fox of Jersey City each $2,500. 
The case grew’ out of the wholesale raid on 
bueketshops in seven cities on April 2, 1910. 
I,ouis A. Celia, one of the Celia brothers, 
was arrested on a perjury charge in June, 
1910, in proceedings brought by the Gov¬ 
ernment to remove the case to Washington 
from New York. 
Ten persons are dead and 20 w’ounded as 
a result of a fight February 10 betw’een 
strikers and authorities near Mucklow, W. 
Va., in the Kanawa coal strike district. 
Seven of the dead are strikers and three 
were members of the mine guards and rail¬ 
road police. Of the injured 15 are said to 
be strikers and the other guards. The Gov¬ 
ernor at once ordered troops rushed to the 
scene of the disturbance. 
WASHINGTON.—It is shown in reports 
submitted to I’ostmaster-General Hitchcock 
that the international postal money order 
business has decreased nearly $12,000,000 
in the past year on account of the operation 
of the postal savings system in this coun¬ 
try. During this period the aggregate 
amount sent has dropped from $109,000,000 
to $97,000,000. The international business 
increased at about the rate of $17,000,000 
a year during the two years preceding the 
establishment of postal savings in this 
country and during the eight years previous 
to that the normal increase was about 
$9,000,000 a year. According to the offi¬ 
cials the experience of the past two years 
has established the fact that comparatively 
little money deposited in the postal sav¬ 
ings system has been withdrawn from pri¬ 
vate banks. 
Flagrant abuse of the rights of the In¬ 
dian farmers, disregard of the homestead 
rights of bona fide settlers and extrava¬ 
gance that makes the reconstruction period 
in the South look like parsimony by com¬ 
parison are among the charges made against 
the United States reclamation service in 
a report by the sub-committee of the House 
Committee on Expenditure in the Interior 
Department. The sub-committee made a 
first hand investigation of the Gila River 
and Salt River irrigation projects in Ari¬ 
zona. The report charges that there has 
been expended in excess of the initial 
estimate of the cost of the Salt 
River project $6,747,396, which the 
Government must pay. The total ex¬ 
penditure to June 30, 1912, is $10,547,396. 
This is the alleged loss which the report 
says Uncle Sam will have to pay. The re¬ 
port makes the charge that the relations 
between the land grabbers and the South¬ 
ern Pacific Land Company were intimate. It 
goes on to say that through the development 
of the San Carlos water power in the Salt 
River valley the Maricopa and Pima In¬ 
dians have been deprived of the water they 
used to enjoy for farming and that the state 
of the reservation lias become distressing. 
The reclamation service has urged the In¬ 
dians to give up their lands in payment for 
the development of the project and that 
they had their interests in the hands of the 
Indiau office, which was in turn conducted 
by the Department of the Interior. The 
report charges that James R. Garfield, Sec¬ 
retary of the Interior in 1907, signed the 
papers divesting the Indians of their prior 
rights in the water supply and blames him 
for the burden thus placed upon the In¬ 
dians. The report says the Indians did not 
sign away their rights, but Garfield signed 
for them. The administration of the re¬ 
clamation service is attacked and charges 
of unwarranted extravagance are made. 
FARM AND GARDEN.—The Government 
may attempt to enforce the collection of 
$1,000,000 from oleomargarine manufactur¬ 
ers who used colored cotton-seed oil, under 
the ban of the Treasury Department. Com¬ 
missioner Cabell, of the Internal Revenue 
Bureau, February 6 informed a House com¬ 
mittee that the Treasury would take no 
action toward a compromise until the com¬ 
mittee and the Federal courts at Chicago 
had concluded their investigations. The 
Commissioner estimated that taxes' amount¬ 
ing to $1,200,000 were evaded by manufac¬ 
turers who used oil colored with sulphur. 
The companies have offered $102,000 as a 
compromise. Pure-food inspectors failed to 
catch the artificial coloring of the cotton¬ 
seed oil. Commissioner Cabell declared his 
department would probably have detected 
the artificial coloring if it had not ac¬ 
cepted the findings of the pure-food inspec¬ 
tors. 
The New York State Grange at the con¬ 
cluding session of its fortieth annual con¬ 
vention February 7, adopted resolutions 
commending the State Conservation Com¬ 
mission for its action in conserving the 
water powers of the State, praised Governor 
Sulzer for his policy to keep the Public 
Health Department out of politics and rec¬ 
ommended to him that the ’‘non-partisan 
principle of choice of Public Service Com¬ 
missioners be followed.” The Grange also 
recommended a legal reserve life insurance 
company be organized under the laws of 
the State, uniform textbooks, providing the 
books are furnished free of cost to the 
pupils; a more effective enforcement of the 
pure food law, and that the ‘‘money de¬ 
posited in the postal savings banks by the 
common people he let out in mortgages on 
real estate at low rates of interest.” 
The delegates appointed by the Governors 
of 10 Eastern and Middle States to con¬ 
sider the improvement of State laws for 
the control of the production and handling 
of milk and the suppression of bovine 
tuberculosis recommended that the inspec¬ 
tion of dairy farms should be a function 
of State authorities rather than of city 
authorities at the two-day conference called 
by the New York Milk Committee. The 
delegates failed to indorse that committee’s 
suggestion that the organization for carry¬ 
ing out such control should consist of a 
State milk board. It was recommended in¬ 
stead that the inspection of dairy farms 
should be centralized in the State Depart¬ 
ment of Agriculture or in States where no 
such department exists in the State Bu¬ 
reau of Cattle Inspection. The New York 
Milk Committee has in preparation a bill 
which it intends to introduce in the present 
Legislature to establish a State milk board 
upon which the action of the conference 
has a direct hearing. It was recommended 
further that State milk control should ex¬ 
tend over the manufacture and handling of 
milk products. The recommendation that 
dairy herds should be classified and graded 
and placed on record was passed and that 
dairy buildings, equipment and methods be 
classified or graded and be placed on rec¬ 
ord. The recommendation that milk as de¬ 
livered on the market should be classified 
and graded waff adopted unanimously with¬ 
out discussion. There were 31 delegates 
present, representing the States of New 
Hampshire. Vermont, Massachusetts, Con¬ 
necticut, Rhode Island, Maine. New York. 
New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. 
