Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

Various newspapers quoted Mr. Hitchcock variously on the same point or to the same end, and two Congressmen acquaintances reported that he had personally talked to them along the same lines.

Only a “few magazine publishers” would be affected by legislation of the character recommended in the rider amendment? That is the point I desire here and now to consider. I hope the reader will go carefully and thoughtfully through the consideration with me.

First it may be said, and safely admitted, that no such legislation as that recommended in the “rider” previously discussed, would be sustained by any court in this country, unless its wording was so modified as to make its requirements and restrictions apply to all periodicals, or at least to all monthly and weekly periodicals. Even then, it is doubtful if any court could be found to sustain such a piece of class or special legislation unless its terms were broadened to cover newspapers, so numerously and so aggressively are the latter trenching upon what is generally recognized as the weekly and monthly periodical field of effort, influence and usefulness.

I think that any informed, fair-minded reader will agree that that statement is a fair statement of governing facts, unless we question the honesty of our courts in the discharge of their judicial duties or question the juridic honesty of some member or members of the ruling court.

That may read like a blunt or offensive way of putting it. But we are not writing of a Palm Beach twilight party nor of a Newport frolic. We are writing of and to a serious subject—a subject which vitally touches and trenches into the vital interests of ninety millions of people—the ninety millions who are the blood and bone and sinew of this nation of ours. It is a subject of such grave import as to make it necessary that we call a spade a spade, a thief a thief, a scoundrel a scoundrel, and judicial weakness, judicial treachery.

That is why I put, plain and strong, the point that no court could be found in this country to sustain legislation of the character covered in Mr. Hitchcock’s “rider” amendment to the 1911 postoffice appropriation bill, and that every informed, fair-minded man must concur in the statements that I have made in the three or four preceding paragraphs.

That “rider” amendment would “affect only a few magazine publishers,” says Mr. Hitchcock, or as he is reported to have said.

Now, let us look over the field a little. Let us make an honest, intelligent effort—an effort not warped by political hopes and aspirations nor by personal prejudices and interests—to see who or whom would be affected by such special or class legislation.

First, the reader must get a mental hip-lock or strangle-hold on the fact that the second-class mail business of this country—the output of periodical publishers—in marketed values, is somewhere around one billion dollars a year.