To increase this revenue, circulations were forced by methods that directly violated the law, and these methods are still being used. Premiums were given to an extent that led to an investigation by the Post Office Department, and it was found (Third Assistant Postmaster General's report, Dec. 1, 1911, p. 39) that in one case four-fifths of the subscribers went for the premium, the publication being worth nothing except as an advertising medium because of its large circulation—a circulation with which, despite the government subvention, literature had nothing to do. Another periodical, weekly and agricultural, forced by premium 122,000 subscriptions out of 143,000; another 41,000 out of 53,000.
There are hundreds of needless growths of this sort. As an instance, there are published in the United States some eighty-six banking periodicals. The Secretary of the American Bankers' Association, when asked how many of these were needed, replied: "From three to six, and the other eighty are 'leg pullers.' They live in great part by sandbagging advertising out of financial interests."
Dr. Talcott Williams, at the session of the American Historical Association at Washington a few years ago, said that one hundred years earlier, the aggregate weight of one copy of each issue of an ordinary city daily for a year was about ten pounds; fifty years later it was twenty-five pounds; twenty-five years later it had become fifty pounds; and when he spoke it was a hundred and twenty-five pounds; while in some instances the Sunday editions alone weigh more than that. How much of it is published to the real advantage of the community?
Upon careful consideration, it seems evident that at first the law diverted the patronage of the reading public from books to the higher-priced and more respectable magazines, those so priced that their sale at the published rate would be possible even if the advertising were a minor consideration; that next, the twenty-five cent issues cut the ground from under these older and higher-priced ones; that then rapidly appeared the fifteen-cent ones, and next the ten-cent ones—all so expensive to make that only the great volume of advertising rendered the low price possible; and that now the five-cent issues are, in their turn, no less rapidly displacing the ten-cent ones. Swift's doggerel tells the tale:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
While this article has primarily to do with the decadence of our literature, the economic side should not be lost sight of.
For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, the expense account of the Post Office Department amounted to over $260,000,000. The second-class mail supplied nearly two-thirds of the tonnage, and cost more than one-third of the total aggregate of expense, but the revenue paid by its publishers amounted to just under $10,000,000, as against the cost of over $86,000,000.
To make up for the loss thus incurred, the first-class mail—the letter mail, which weighed only about one-fifth as many pounds, had to supply $175,000,000 of revenue from a service costing the government less than $100,000,000. That is to say, the letter mail paid eighteen times as much revenue as the second-class mail, and weighed but one-fifth as much.
There were carried the past year very nearly two billions of postal cards which produced a revenue of nearly $20,000,000. The weight of these was only about 12,000,000 pounds. Twelve million pounds of postal cards therefore produced almost exactly twice as much revenue as one thousand million pounds of publishers' second-class mail.