VICTOR HOWARD METCALF
METCALF, VICTOR HOWARD, secretary of commerce and labor, is the second cabinet officer to hold that portfolio, entering upon his duties on July 1, 1904. The first secretary was Honorable George B. Cortelyou, under whose direction the initial steps of the department’s organization were taken. The creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor is a just recognition of the importance and magnitude of the nation’s commercial and industrial growth and expansion. Under the organic act its province and duty are to foster, promote, and develop the foreign and domestic commerce, mining, manufacturing, shipping, and fishery industries, labor interests, and transportation facilities of the United States.
In addition to the above definition of its scope, the department was given many of the functions which up to that time had been discharged by other departments; functions which often did not pertain to those departments in their original organization. This was notably true of the treasury department, to whose control had been assigned many affairs unrelated to the work of the treasury, merely because there was no specific department to which these duties could more properly be assigned. From the treasury department to the Department of Commerce and Labor have been transferred the Lighthouse Service, the Inspection of Immigrants, the Seal Fisheries of Alaska, the Steamboat Inspection Service, the Bureau of Navigation, the Bureau of Standards, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Bureau of Statistics; from the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of the Census. The Department of Labor and the Fish Commission were independent branches of the Government, which have been brought into this new department, and the Bureau of Foreign Commerce, of the Department of State, was consolidated with the Bureau of Statistics.
In addition to these already existing functions, and in order that the great manufacturing and industrial interests of the country might be directly cared for, congress created the Bureau of Manu-
