Missouri to yield about 4.30 per cent.; and the 5's of a road district in Texas to yield 5 per cent.

The average yield on this assortment of bonds figured out a little less than 4 per cent. With careful management the total income accruing at that rate might prove sufficient, but the investor, without knowing exactly why, suspected he might do better. In any event he thought it would be good business to learn more about the market for municipals before concluding the transaction with his bank.

He started to make an independent Investigation, and, at the time he wrote to this department, he had progressed just far enough to demonstrate what a dangerous thing a little knowledge can be, especially when it pertains to the science of investment discrimination. He was full of resentment at his banker for having tried, as he believed, to make an unreasonable profit on the proposed investment by taking advantage of his inexperience, and a long-standing business relationship was on the point of being severed. The unpleasant situation had arisen in this way: Among the bonds mentioned in the advertisements and circulars the investor had collected, there were a number which appeared to him to bear striking similarity to those recommended by the bank, except that their yields were materially higher. He had picked out for comparison with the four issues suggested by the cashier two street improvement bonds of Western cities, both yielding 7 per cent., and one of each of the other two classes, yielding respectively 5 and 5 per cent.

He said that he was fully aware that in all comparisons of the kind allowance should be made for such differences in interest rates as might be due to the relative intensity of the competition for money for all purposes among the various localities. But where municipal credit was involved, it seemed to him preposterous to try to explain on that ground such wide differences as his comparison showed. He wanted to know, therefore, if he did not have a just complaint against his local banker for placing an exorbitant price upon his offerings.

revealed a number of points about muse cipal bonds, in regard to which a cleare understanding on the investor's pa happily proved a remedy for his resentment. The most important of these points may be referred to here in some de tail as one that has called for explanative in the correspondence of this department with increasing frequency of late. It i the one involved in distinguishing between the class of street improvement bonds which the investor found to be availabe to yield as much as 7 per cent. and the class represented by the issue of the Ohio city yielding only slightly more than 4 per cent.

Both are

Here is a somewhat unfortunate, even if unavoidable, duplication of investment terms. Both of these two classes of bonds are issued for identical purposes. But there is an important fundamental difference between them as far as the nature of the obligation is concerned. payable out of special taxes assessed against the real estate benefiting from the improvement. But in the one case the obligation is that of the property owner, personally, safe-guarded by a lien upon the particular property affected: whereas in the other case the obligation is that of the municipality itself, safeguarded by its power to tax all the real and personal property within its limits to meet any deficiencies that may result from defaults in payments of the special assessments.

No general rule can be laid down for distinguishing quickly between these two classes of bonds. Experienced investors. however, are accustomed to go on the theory that a "straight" municipal bond can less frequently be bought to yield more than 5 per cent.; so that when they see offerings at the higher rates, they begin to analyze to determine the kind of credit upon which the bonds are based. It is plain that the term "municipal," elastic as it is, ought not to be stretched to include the first of these two classes of bonds. And it is plain that much more careful discrimination is called for in the selection of investments from this class. despite the fact that it has an established record for safety upon which many careful bankers are found willing to stake their

long sea calls. Commerce runs all these "aids to navigation," as they are called, owns the lights and the sirens and the bells and pays the men who keep them burning or bellowing or ringing. Just now it is particularly concerned with making the shores of Alaska safe, with 319 signals already in place along those desolate Northern coasts. A light on the size of this undertaking breaks through the fog of general ignorance when one finds by a study of the map that the Alaskan and Aleutian shores reach east and west the distance from Charleston, S. C., to San Diego, Cal., and north and south cover as much continuous distance of coast as from the Canadian line to Mexico.

The function of the Bureau of Navigation is the enforcement of the navigation laws in all the ports and territorial waters of the United States, and the function of the Steamboat Inspection Service is the inspection of American passenger-carrying vessels in order to make travel by water safer.

It is the present red-tape law that the Department shall inspect the hulls and machinery of all passenger-carrying steam vessels more than 65 feet in length. This definition means that steam vessels less than 65 feet in length are not inspected and the Department has no direct jurisdiction over the enormous fleet of 250,000 motor boats plying the waters of the United States.

When the Eastland capsized at her dock in Chicago last July, the Steamship Inspection Service was given a good deal of unenviable publicity, but, all told, it has done its work well. During the fiscal year 1914 more than 318 million passengers were transported on vessels coming under the inspection of the Bureau. But during that period, counting out suicides, accidental drownings, and other unpreventable items, the total number of passengers who lost their lives was only 105; that is approximately a ratio of one life lost for every 3,000,000 passengers transported. During the same period the Bureau inspected and certified 7,930 vessels and issued licenses. to 18,871 officers of all grades.

The duties of the Bureau of Navigation, which at the close of the fiscal year on June 30, 1914, comprised keeping in order

26,943 vessels of the American merchant marine-which even then represented the largest tonnage in our history-have now been considerably increased by the Act of August 18, 1914, which removed the restrictions of American registry to vessels built in the United States and officered by American citizens. The European war thus hastened a change in a moss-grow: maritime policy which had for many years been hampering our progress on the seas In the fourteen months between the passage of the second section of this act and the middle of November, 1915, 168 vessels of 574,244 gross tons were registered under the American flag. Making these great and growing fleets function properly involved regulations all the way from such apparently insignificant details as carrying the ship's name in a conspicuous place of obeying the rules of the road, up to the recently adopted regulation making compulsory the equipment of all vessels carrying fifty or more persons with wireless.

fisheries.

SAVING THE FISH

When it comes to the Bureau of Fisheries Mr. Redfield's Department of Help seems to become primarily an agent of conservation rather than of commerce. But there are those who ask why the seal and fcx and other furry herds on the islands of Bering Sea should come under the head of fisheries. You might just as well ask the Navy Department why naval officers are kings of the Pacific islands of Guam and Tutuila, ask the Commissioner of Education why he supervises the reindeer industry in Alaska, or ask General McIntyre, of the War Department, why his Insular Bureau should be running the civil governments of Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands. As Mr. Redfield very aptly points out, "Custody over the terrestrial fur-bearing animals of Alaska, which is now imposed by law on the Bureau of Fisheries, is an uncongenial, incongruous duty, entirely foreign to the proper functions of that Bureau.”

The Bureau of Fisheries has more than enough to do to look after its own fish. It hatches them in 130 stations scattered over 34 states and the territory of Alaska, and it supervises the catching of them whereve

hey are caught, from the Yukon to Glouceser, Mass. Last year it brought 4,047 nillions of them into this world; it transplanted Pacific salmon to the coast of Maine and it grafted Atlantic lobsters on the Pacific shores of Washington. Furthermore, it withstood the earnest representations of various Congressmen and Senators to stock their local waters with alien fish which would, to the Bureau's best knowledge and belief, incontinently destroy all the native fish in the applicant's district.

But fast as it breeds and stocks and transplants fish, the fishermen would gain upon the Bureau but for rigid conservation restrictions. Out on the North Pacific, where the Alaskan salmon fisheries employ 22,000 persons with an investment of nearly 40 million dollars, the regulations are rigid enough, but four "salmon agents" have to cover that territory of many thousand miles of coast and are obliged to borrow boats wherewith to do their inspection from the canneries which they are to inspect.

The oldest scientific service of the United States Government is the Coast and Geodetic Survey. It is also, by the acknowledgment of other nations, the greatest and most efficient of its kind in the world.

Some idea of the geographical size of its job may be gained from these comparisons: There are, for example, several times as many miles of coast in Alaska alone as in the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; the surveying and charting of the Philippines is in itself a far greater task than is imposed upon France by all her own marine borders in Europe; the survey of the Hawaiian Islands, Samoa, Guam, and Porto Rico is a much greater project than the entire survey of the European coast of Germany. In all this great work the Department is dealing first with humanity, and secondly with commerce.

STANDARDS AND THE CENSUS

The Bureau of Standards really has-or will soon have, as it becomes better known and appreciated-about as much reason for separate existence in relation to the industries of the country as the Department of Agriculture admittedly has to farming. Its helpful activities cover an enormous range

of scientific work in physics, chemistry, and engineering, which on the one hand vitally interest the individual consumer and, on the other, the manufacturer, educational institutions, public utility corporations, and state governments. It defines and stands for honest weights and measures in daily trade, works out manuals of safety rules for extra-hazardous occupations, and tests, standardizes, and watches barometers. The 338 employees of the Bureau made, last year, more than 100,000 useful tests, the results of which the Bureau furnishes with its service of information to the public, to the industries, and to other Government bureaus.

THE "BUSINESS MEN'S BUREAU"

The Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce is the present centre of the Department. And it is working with German thoroughness.

It does its task abroad through a threefold force; two of these, the Consular Service and the commercial agents, have been established for some years. The third, the commercial attachés, was created by Mr. Redfield and authorized by Congress less than two years ago. Consuls and consuls-general, with many diplomatic services to perform, keep track of commercial information in their several localities only. Commercial agents do not deal with localities at all but pursue specific trade subjects through many countries all round the world. The commercial attaché is a new thing in our trade history. Attached to the Legation or the Embassy in a given country, he is not limited to any locality but carefully studies the commercial development and progress of the people among whom he lives with a sole view toward the export and import trade of that country with the United States. Eight of these useful officials have already been appointed and have been on duty for nearly a year at London, Berlin, Paris, Petrograd, Buenos Aires, Peking, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, and Santiago de Chile.

To make the dissemination of its information more immediately available the Bureau has now established branch offices in Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and St. Louis.

A

T THREE points around the Caribbean the equatorial sun glitters on the bayonets of United States marines: on the southern coast of Cuba one hundred of them guard our own naval station at Guantánamo; eighteen hundred more of them, a full brigade, have converted an Antillean chaos into Haiti; and far away westward a company of them is camped on the shore of Lake Managua, just outside the capital of Nicaragua. These two last detachments are established on foreign soil. But all those United States bayonets touched by the equatorial sun are benevolent bayonets, and the marines who click them on to the muzzles of their Springfields are peacemakers, peace-maintainers.

The Congress of the United States in Washington has recently considered or is now considering separate agreements or treaties with four of the governments of equatorial territories surrounding the Caribbean, and each one of those agreements followed the bayonet of a marine. into the tropical domain under consideration. And in every single instance, just as the bayonet came benevolently not to make war but to insure an enduring peace, so the agreement or treaty has been devised as a means of maintaining such peace upon secure foundations after the bayonet has been withdrawn. In Santo Domingo the customs revenues are being administered by the United States so that the current expenses and the amortization of the foreign debt may be paid, uninterrupted by the strife of faction. In Haiti, which shares with Santo Domingo the same rich and unrestful island, a

In

treaty was confirmed last November by the Haitian Senate which, with the concurrence of the Senate of the United States, will accomplish for the Black Republic the same objects as those in force under the Santo Domingan agreement already in operation near by. A third treaty proposes to place a higher valuation than the purchase price upon the territory once Colombian through which now flows the Panama Canal and to present these gratuitous arrears, together with an apology, to the sister republic. The fourth treaty, and with this we are more particularly concerned, makes it possible for Nicaragua to clear away the possibility of foreign creditors foreclosing on their loans, and at the same time grants to us such rights and privileges as will insure the future inviolability not only of Nicaragua but also of the Monroe Doctrine from European aggression.

All four of these treaties, differing in their terms and application, are nevertheless all of them separate manifestations of an integral policy, the policy of good-will, justice, and inter-reliability among the republics of the New World.

This is the story of the Nicaraguan treaty. What is proposed is that the United States shall obtain the grant in perpetuity to build and maintain an interoceanic canal across Nicaragua; that it sha!! further obtain renewable leases for nava! bases of the Corn Islands on the Ailantic Coast of Nicaragua, and of Nicaraguan territory on the Pacific Bay of Fonseca. In return the United States expressly agrees to pay down a sum of $3,000,000 gold with which the Nicaraguan Government may supplement loans already