To illustrate: One publishing company, it is reported, made last year a net profit of over two million dollars. Their postage was about $650,000, and it cost the government over $4,500,000 to handle the output. Moreover, more than $11,000,000 of advertising was borne on the pages of those publications, and for it the company also received virtually free distribution.
Had a special privilege as great as this of the second-class mail rate been enjoyed at national expense by any class of citizens other than its publishers, the publishers would not have permitted it to exist a year. Yet the loss has long been well known to post-office officials and members of Congress, though for a time it was kept from the knowledge of the public, because practically the sole means the public has had of obtaining the knowledge, has been through the columns of journals that enjoy the privilege. The North American Review for February, 1908, had a most scathing article by Professor Munroe Smith, entitled The Dogma of Journalistic Inerrancy that illustrated this situation forcibly.
No lobby sent to Washington in furtherance of corrupt legislation has ever been more persistent or dealt less fairly with both legislators and public than the lobby that has worked for retention of the second-class mail rate. Some able editors have been accused of hunting very jealously for other people's pulls while maintaining a pretty heavy one of their own.
And the ceaselessly increasing monthlies of mammoth circulation that so nobly, though with somewhat of iteration, harp upon the graft of our plutocrats, our patent medicine manufacturers, our frenzied financiers, our food trusts, our fraudulent insurance officials—is it possible that none of their diatribes, worthy though they may be, are never to be directed against themselves? Let us hope that some of these public-spirited citizens so patriotically intent upon ridding a much-suffering land of its various forms of organized rapacity, may be led to see a great light in connection with the one industry of this country that is by law largely relieved from subjection to those competitive forces to which producers and distributors of all other articles are keenly alive.
We may in time realize the truth of Emerson's remark that "though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear." For it is fast becoming notorious that that advertising which is as the breath of life to all those low-priced periodicals, has passed beyond the line of marginal utility, and will not compensate the farther sale of the magazines at less than cost of production.
A generation ago an English-born resident of Australia was homesick. He thought how charming it would be to see gamboling about his place an English rabbit. He imported a pair. The soil and climate proved congenial. They multiplied with enormous rapidity, and recently the Australian government had a standing offer of £25,000 for anybody who would devise some practical method of exterminating the rabbit pest. Another settler, this time a New Zealander of Caledonian birth, recalling to mind the rugged beauty of the Scotch thistle, imported that, and planted it at his doorway. The resultant development was similar. There are hundreds and hundreds of square miles of Scotch thistles in New Zealand. A few years ago, a scientist imported for experimental purposes, the gypsy moth, and caged it in his back yard in one of the suburbs of Boston. A storm of wind and rain wrecked the cage, and some of the moths escaped, with the result that the state of Massachusetts has spent over three million dollars in an effort to exterminate this pest that is devastating its forests and bids fair to extend over the entire United States with a resultant loss of countless millions of dollars.
In legislation as in biology, it sometimes seems easier, even with good motives, to spread noxious things than useful ones. Our postal legislation has bred a swarm of periodicals of which the vast majority are but a swarm of pests.