Miscellaneous Mentions

POLITICAL NOTES

Miscellaneous Mentions

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one-time (1920) unsuccessful Democratic nominee for U. S. Vice President, now vice president of the Fidelity & Deposit Co. of Maryland, sat at his Manhattan desk last week and said to a news-gatherer: "I will state unequivocally that I do not choose to run for the United States Senate in 1928, any more than I did in 1922 or 1926."

Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, continued his pleasure cruise on the yacht Venezia. At Venice, Count Giuseppe Volpi, Italian Minister of Finance, suave, Vandyke-bearded, came on board. They--the richest men in politics in two nations--chatted quietly, shunned weighty subjects. Count Volpi made his fortune in trading companies, was once Governor of Tripoli, has (as Minister of Finance) raised the value of the lira and drawn up the Italian Debt Settlements.

Charles P. Taft II, able 30-year-old son of Mr. Chief Justice William Howard Taft of the U. S. Supreme Court, has served almost eight months of a two-year term as prosecuting attorney of Hamilton County, Ohio. Last week, reporting to the Ohio Attorney General, he said: "The difficulty of investigation is perhaps the most serious in our entire system of criminal justice. There are not enough police properly to patrol the county and there are very few communities in the country where the training of police forces is adequate. . . . There are many cases ... in which the witnesses refuse to tell what they know, very often from a fear of the consequences at the hands either of the defendant or his friends. . . . This condition is especially true in what have received the common name of bootleg murders. Even when the witnesses are willing to testify, perjury is one of the most common offenses in the criminal court."