One of the many activities of the Bureau of Standards is the testing of speedometers for automobiles Practically all the newsprint paper of the United States and Canada is manufactured from wood pulp, and the supply is limited. The Bureau of Standards employs a small paper-making machine in its efforts to find a suitable substitute The function of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce is to encourage foreign trade A MACHINE FOR COMPILING TRADE FIGURES Copyright by Brown Bros. In addition to the work of consuls in the promotion of our foreign trade, the post of commercial attaché has recently been added to the service. Ten of these attachés have already been appointed, and their reports to the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce are available to American business men ONE OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE Samples of European hardware sold in South America and gathered by agents of the United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce to study foreign markets for certain lines of American manufactured goods and then bringing them back to confer with the manufacturers direct, and in many other ways, the Bureau is conducting a most vigorous educational propaganda on the value of an export trade and how to get and keep it. The Bureau coöperates closely with trade associations and chambers of commerce throughout the country. and it is getting "results," which is the one thing that interests the business man. The goal toward which the immense and widespread activities of the Government, in collaboration with scientific, technical, industrial, and commercial organizations and corporations, is working is, first, to put American industry on a scientific basis; and, second, to coördinate all industrial and commercial activities into a great national machine that shall work smoothly as a unit for the mutual benefit of all its component parts. TENTACLES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE An exhibit at the Panama-Pacific Exposition showing how the Department reaches all parts of the world in its development of foreign trade JAMES MIDDLETON W HEN Mr. Franklin K. Lane began his work as Secretary of the Interior, he announced that he had only one aim that was to humanize his department. The Interior Department touched closely the every-day lives of millions of people. It had jurisdiction over our national resources -the wealth of public lands, water-powers, oil, gas, coal, phosphate, and other mineral beds that make up our vast storehouse of national capital. His interest in this great inheritance, Mr. Lane said, was primarily not geological, but human. How best could it serve the comfort and happiness of the millions of American citizens who really owned it? Mr. Lane has been industriously working at this task for three years. He has accomplished several notable things; particularly, he has persuaded Congress to open up Alaska by constructing a Government-owned railroad. He has reorganized the Reclamation Service and obtained a working system for leasing Alaskan coallands. Up to the present time, however, Mr. Lane has met insuperable opposition in his greatest work: the unlocking of the national resources on the public domain. Only the absorption of popular interest in other matters has diverted interest from this great national question. The Taft Administration went to pieces largely on the conservation issue. The conviction, founded or unfounded, that the Interior Department, under Mr. Ballinger, was being used to hand over large areas of public property to private "interests" gave it a blow from which it never recovered. In the stress of the European |
