THE HUGHES COMMISSION.
What little space permits me to say of the report of the Hughes Commission may as well be said here.
In their report the commissioners very frankly admit the meagerness, or, on numerous important points, total lack of informative data. But, as the President states, they proceed to put on record a finding of 6 cents a pound as the cost of handling and transporting paid second-class matter and 5 cents a pound as the cost of similar service on free-in-county matter, for the year 1908. They finally recommend, however, that the present “transient” rate (for copies of periodicals mailed by other than publishers) be continued—1 cent for each 4 ounces; also that the present free-in-county privilege be retained, but not extended.
What does that “not extended” mean?
I do not know. Do you? Does it mean that the country newspapers now issued—now entered in Postoffice Department for free haulage and handling—shall continue free and that no new newspapers established, founded and distributed in counties, shall be transported and handled free?
If it does not mean that, what does it mean? If it means that, then why does this Commission recommend a thing that is primarily—elementary—wrong under the organic law of this government?
The Constitution of these United States specifically prohibits “special” legislation. Then why, I ask, should the recommendation of this Commission be complied with? I have been publishing The Hustler, a controlled Republican or Democrat 4 to 8 pager, as the case may be, for four years. Paul Jones comes along and flings in his money to publish and print the Democratic Booster in the same county. Does this Commission mean to recommend that The Hustler be carried and distributed free in the county and that The Booster be required to pay the regular pound rate for the same service?
A flat rate of 2 cents per pound is recommended for all other periodical matter, newspapers and magazines alike.
Well, that recommended rate is of course, better than Mr. Hitchcock’s “rider” recommendation, discussed in a previous page. The Commission’s “finding” that the cost of carriage, handling and delivery of second-class mail “was approximately 6 cents a pound” is also an appreciable step-down (toward the facts), as compared with Mr. Hitchcock’s assured—milled, screened and sifted—finding that said cost was 9.23 cents a pound—a finding as late as March 1, 1911. So if this commendable “merger” of views, opinions and guesses keeps growing, as industrial, rail and other mergers are wont to grow, the postal rate payers of the country may hope yet to find that even their great men may agree.
I have discussed this second-class mail rate—the cent-a-pound rate for periodicals—elsewhere. With private companies (the express companies) carrying and delivering second-class mail matter for the average mail haul, at one-half cent a pound (and standing for a “split” with the railroads for one-half of that), the question as to whether or not the government can carry mail matter without loss at one cent a pound, is not worth debating among men whose brains are not worn in their sub-cellars.
I mean the last statement to apply to third and fourth class matter as well as to second. What it has cost the government, or what it now costs the government, to transport, handle and distribute the mails is another and quite different matter from what such service can be and should be rendered for. Was it not that the people’s money is lavishly wasted by such foolishness and foolery, a dignified commission of three or six men sagely deliberating upon, critically “investigating” and laboredly discussing what it costs the government—what the government in 1908 or any other year paid—to carry and distribute the mails, might be staged as the working model of a joke. If a Commission’s time and the people’s money were spent in making a careful, thorough investigation as to what it should cost to collect, transport, handle and distribute the mails, and as to just where and how the millions of dollars, now annually wasted in an over-unmanned, incompetently managed, raided and raiding service, could be saved, results fully warranting the expenditures made on account of these postal-investigating commissions would readily be obtained.
A summary of the proceedings of the Hughes Commission is presented elsewhere. Here I shall take space for only two or three observations. First, as is evidenced by the Commission’s report, the Postoffice Department was before it in conspicuous volubility and the frequency of a stock ticker during a raid, with call money at 84. Postmaster General Hitchcock and his Second and Third Assistants appear to have been the chief “floor representatives” of the department during the flurry. Of 201 “Exhibits” listed by the Commission, about 100 of them—reports, documents, memoranda and letters—found origin if not paternity in the Postoffice Department, and a considerable portion of them was already on file in government archives. Of the sixteen papers submitted after close of “Hearings,” fourteen or fifteen are letters and memoranda of the department, besides which seven memoranda are mentioned as having been received from “the Postoffice Department and not marked as exhibits.”
That should make up a pretty fair collection of departmental argument, views, opinions and “estimates,” should it not? It is very doubtful, though—debatable, if not doubtful—if the collection is worth $50,000. Especially does such a valuation appear questionably excessive, when it is observed that much of the collection is made up of public documents, the findings of former postal commissions and committees, and of reports and showings made up by the Postoffice Department at departmental expenditure of time and money, and not at an expense chargeable to the Commission’s appropriation. Of course the Hughes Commission may not have followed the precedent set by most prior postal Commissions, and by commissions in general. The Hughes Commissioners may not have spent all of their $50,000 appropriation. Let us hope they did not. However, a statement of expenditures actually made would be, by some of us at least, an appreciated “exhibit.”
Another feature of the Commission’s 108-page report that deserves special attention is the close adherence of its findings to the findings of present postal officials. Even in cases where the opinions of past officials are quoted commendingly, the opinions usually support and bolster the opinions of Mr. Hitchcock and his assistants. The report presents a number of tabulations, among which are several that are most excellent and informative. However, the tabulations, and the more important conclusions of the text as well, are based upon “estimates,” rather than upon ascertained facts. Then, too, these estimates, as is somewhat annoyingly evident, are all, or nearly all, the departmental estimates of the present Administration. Of course, that should in no way impair their value or dependability and it probably would not, but for two facts: The present Postmaster General has, for two years or more, displayed great activity—at times, a fevered if not frenzied activity—to secure the enactment of laws and issuance of executive orders to accomplish results which, while they may appear most desirable to him, were considered by many thousands of our people as being very objectionable, indeed, inimical to the fundamental right of free speech in this country and a menace to a free press and to popular education. The “estimates” which the Hughes Commission has published as basis for its findings quite uniformly, if not entirely, support the contentions which the Postmaster General has been making—at times, making with little or no warrant of fact to support.
Again, it will be observed by careful readers of the Commission’s report that the “estimates” upon which several of its more important findings are based, are conspicuously lacking in elements essentially necessary in the structure of reliable estimates from which fact or facts may be deduced. To warrant the drawing of conclusions of fact from it, the structural material of an estimate must consist largely, if not wholly, of fact, not of conclusions drawn from other conclusions which, in turn were deduced from estimates based on other estimates that may or may not have been accurate and dependable.
As just stated, the estimates which the Commission appears largely to have accepted, are nearly all productions of the Postoffice Department. Few of them are built directly upon ascertained facts. Most of them are estimates of estimates based on other estimates. It appears that the Postmaster General’s estimates are Assistant Postmaster Generals’ estimates of the estimates made by weighing clerks of the several classes of mail-weights carried by certain railroads during six months in the year 1908. The nearest approach such a method or procedure makes to a fact is an estimate of the fact, you see.