Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

Some pages back I adverted to the fact that the deficit of $6,000,000 for the fiscal year 1909-10 was the ground-plan of Mr. Hitchcock for an increase in second-class postage rates. That deficit he himself has converted into a surplus of several thousands of dollars.

Why, then, is he still trailing those independent periodicals?

Why, too, it is relevant to ask, did he so suddenly hear that the people of this country were crying for a cut of fifty per cent in first-class, or sealed, postage rates, much as the advertiser declares the children cry for Castoria? To the Man on the Ladder it appears that what Mr. Hitchcock heard must have been a “far cry”—very far. So far, indeed, that no one who did not have his ear to an ulterior motive could hear it.

You will observe that he worries a couple of years over a “deficit”—a little runabout, five H. P. deficit of $6,000,000. Then by doing a few things which common business sense imperatively dictates should be done, and which, it is well known among competents, any one of a dozen of Mr. Hitchcock’s predecessors should have done, or could have done had not dirty politics blocked them—by doing just a few of the business things which every student of the question knows could have been done and should have been done years ago, Mr. Hitchcock lost his “deficit”—his ground-plan for attack on second-class rates—and found a surplus instead.

The Man on the Ladder does not desire to appear impertinent nor even finicky in his type conversation on this point, but in simple justice to the magnitude of the question he is constrained to ask: Is a “deficit” so essentially necessary to Mr. Hitchcock in a fight to put certain independent periodicals on the financial skids that he must, losing one deficit, immediately set about creating another?

That is just what his move to cut the mail rate on first-class, or sealed, matter must lead to—lead to temporarily of course. In the end a one-cent rate per ounce or fraction thereof will win to a paying basis. That rate will mean a cut of sixteen cents a pound from thirty-two cents a pound for carriage and handling letters and other sealed matter of the first-class. Certainly the postoffice can haul and distribute such matter at a profit at that rate. However, it is equally certain that the department will not handle such matter at a profit for two, three or more years—not so handle it until numerous causes of waste, inhering in the department for years, are sloughed and the department put under strict business management, and not left under partisan political management as now and as it has been for thirty-five or forty years.

With the postal and post card facilities now furnished at the one-cent rate, no considerable number of our people are complaining about the two-cent rate for letters and other sealed matter. But all will welcome a flat rate of one cent on such matter at the present weights. If they get it, either with or without Mr. Hitchcock’s assistance, the people will be getting only what they are entitled to, deficit or no deficit. However, if Mr. Hitchcock thinks a “deficit” necessary armament in his fight to increase second-class mail rates—to increase such rates, as it would appear, on a certain few periodicals which print and publish what the people want to hear and read and not what a few federal officeholders tell them to print and publish, then a cut of 50 per cent in the present first-class postage rates will most certainly create that deficit for him.

In a few years, of course, after business has adjusted itself to the lower rate and the fathers, mothers and sweethearts of the country have learned that they can write a letter to John, Mary, Thomas or Lucy and have it delivered for one cent, whereas it now costs two cents, then Mr. Hitchcock’s created deficit will fade away—will again fade into a surplus.

In the meantime, however, Mr. Hitchcock and associate coterie who apparently are gunning for periodicals which dare tell the truth, will have a “deficit” to use as wadding in their verbal, oratorical and franked ordnance.

The 1910 report of the Postoffice Department sets up something over $202,000,000 as receipts from cancellation of stamps, or stamp sales. Of course, millions of dollars’ worth of those stamps were bought for and canceled in third and fourth class service, catalogues, books, etc.—in third-class carriage and handling, and merchandise parcels in fourth class. One has no data—nor can he obtain such data from the Postoffice Department records—to show what sum or portion of that $202,000,000 worth of stamps was canceled in the transmission of letters and other sealed matter of the first-class. But it may be conservatively stated that if Mr. Hitchcock succeeds in cutting down or curtailing the circulation of weekly and monthly periodicals—especially their advertising pages—he will have no trouble in finding, for two or three years at least, a shrinkage of from $50,000,000 to $75,000,000 in that stamp account.