According to Census Bulletin No. 57 for 1905, there was spent in the preceding year in the entire country for newspapers the enormous sum of $280,000,000, and for all textbooks for use in both public and private schools, sectarian and non-sectarian, and in all colleges, only some $12,000,000! More than $23 spent for ephemeral literature, much of which debases the literary taste of the community, for each dollar spent for literature whose function was technically educational.
To get a further idea of the literary pabulum that the government subvention is creating for us, let us consider an average magazine of the so-called popular sort. Someone defines it as follows:
"A magazine is a small body of literature, entirely surrounded by advertising. In this respect, it resembles a railroad ham sandwich with the advertising bread cut very thick and the literary meat in especially thin slices. The situation is well summarized when Dooley says: 'Hinnessy, mon, last night on my way home from wurruk I bought one of them popular magazines expectin' after I had eaten me supper and put on me slippers, and lighted me pipe, to sit down for a quiet avenin's enjoyment looking over the advertisements, and do you know, mon, twinty-five per cent of the dommed thing was just nothing but "litherachoor."'"
The magazine frequently gives great prominence to pictures of actresses—doubtless by favorable arrangements with their managers. With these may appear an article with an alliterative title, showing How Cleveland was Cunningly Conned; How Placid Philadelphia's Putridity was Purged; Why Denver went to the Devil; etc. Then may follow an article explaining how our reporter Wily Willie went under "Jawn Dee's" window and, by making a noise like an extra dividend, secured an interview with him. Then a trifling poem or two, and a long continued dry-as-dust serial story, which serves in some measure as the talcum powder to disinfect, so to speak, the rest. Then may follow a Retraction article, showing that whereas we stated in our latest issue that an emissary of the Standard Oil Co. was responsible for the Chicago Conflagration by sneaking up behind Mrs. O'Leary's cow and sticking a pin into her while she was being milked, we wish to inform our readers that we are now convinced that this was incorrect. Further investigation shows that the Standard Oil Co. was entirely innocent. It was an employee of the Packing House Trust who was guilty of the dastardly deed. Then perhaps will follow a Passionate Personal Appeal from the publisher for subscriptions to about $10,000,000 worth of stock of the Magazine Company. (Send in any sum from $1 up, use the corner coupon.) All of this will be encased in a gaudy, if not neat, cover bearing a design showing a girl's face and some of her form. If you want to see the rest of that, look at the corset advertisements inside. An old lady lately said that when she read her modern magazine, she felt that she had been to an undress party where the men all came in their "unions" and the women in their "nemos." Then will follow advertisements of soaps, soups, shoes, massage creams and a thousand other articles.
As illustrating another abuse that results from the pound-rate privilege: Let me refer to some periodicals that are light in weight; certain small magazines, for example, weigh but a fraction of an ounce, and the government must distribute many of them in order to secure one cent. We have in our possession a little Farm Journal so light that it takes forty copies to make a pound. As it is published monthly, not until the Post Office has served a subscriber with this journal for three years and four months, will it get as much as a single cent for the entire service.
And the government carries this kind of literature, advertising and all, at one cent a pound—$20 per ton, and charges for books eight cents per pound—$160 per ton, and for the social-letter and business mail, 84 cents per pound, $1680 per ton!!
Bryan's philosophy was sounder than it sometimes has been, when he said:
The Supreme Court has described unjust taxation as larceny in the form of law. If one citizen is compelled by law to pay ten dollars for the support of the government where he ought to only pay five, and under the same law a neighbor is required to pay but five where he should pay ten, the law which causes this inequality simply transfers five dollars from one man's pocket to another's.
Then a law which is each year taking over seventy-five million dollars of net profit, above cost of service, from the ninety-three million people who benefit from letters, in order to give the thirty thousand periodical publishers service for ten million dollars which costs many times that sum, is certainly not merely petty larceny or grand larceny, but larceny that is absolutely grandiose.