Averaging all in all, first-class mail costs at most not quite four times as much per pound as second-class mail, and pays eighty-four times as much.
In other words, each time that one of the forty or fifty million users of the first-class mail puts a two-cent stamp on a letter, one cent pays for the service rendered, and nearly all of the other cent is taken by the Department to give the "special privilege" of service at one-eighth of cost, to less than thirty thousand periodical publishers.
Is it any wonder that new periodicals have begun their career in the United States at the rate of more than ten a day for every day, Sundays and holidays included, of the past fifteen years? Fortunately, however, the death rate is nearly as great as the birth rate; but since those that persist are the selected growths, there is, as we have seen, a tremendous annual increase.
One expert estimates that the total number of books published in the world since the invention of printing is some fifteen millions, and another, more modest, places the figures at between ten and twelve millions. Assuming for each book a first edition of one thousand copies, a somewhat common issue, we should have from ten billion to fifteen billion copies of all. In other words, there are issued in the United States each year from one-half to three-quarters as many copies of periodicals as have ever been published in the first editions of all books ever printed by all the nations of the world.
There can be no deduction made from the general features of the situation other than that the distribution of this one class of merchandise at a practically free rate is nearly the sole reason for this wasteful over-production.
When the pound-rate law was enacted, the distinct purpose was announced that its effect should be educational. The contrary is unmistakably the case. The reading of the ten to twenty minute magazine article or the skimming over of the Sunday paper, seems to have become too often the limit of the intellectual activity of our people of average education.
To carry the Police Gazette at a cent a pound while charging eight times as much for a spelling book or Bible, and then to claim that the law permitting this discrepancy was enacted in the interests of education, is at least edifying. Archbishop Hare in his bright little volume Guesses at Truth once remarked that a very bad reason was in effect next to a very good one.
Mr. J. N. Larned the very eminent librarian says:
The so-called newspaper which interests itself and which labors to interest its readers in the trivialities and ignoble occurrences of the day—in the prize fights and mean preliminaries of prize fights, the boxing matches, the ball games, the races, the teas, the luncheons, the receptions, the dresses, the goings and comings and private doings of private persons—making the most in all possible ways of all petty things and low things, while treating grave matters with levity and impertinence—with what effect can such a newspaper be read? I do not care to say. If I spoke my mind, I might strike harshly at too many whose reading is confined to such sheets, but I will venture so much remark as this: That I would prefer absolute illiteracy for a son or a daughter of mine, total inability to spell a single printed word, rather than that he or she should be habitually a reader of the common newspaper of America of today, and a reader of nothing better.