Most edifying “news” that, is it not? So didactic and brain-building, is it not?
Now, why should the Postoffice Department carry those millions of pounds of Reubenville sheets free?
The department report says it carried about 56,000,000 pounds of such “periodicals” free last year. The figures for this year (1910-11) will probably be around 60,000,000 pounds.
Why should the department give away $600,000 in revenues?
Besides that, the department does not know how much of this “free in county” matter it does carry and distribute. Of course, it may be able to make a more dependable guess at the total tonnage of such second-class matter than can I. However, any one who has been around the “county seat” or the “metropolis” of any of the “hill” or “back” counties during a county, state or national canvass for votes will know that the postmaster’s scales are often sadly out of balance when he weighs into circulation the local newspaper. In fact, it frequently happens that he does not weigh it at all—especially not, if it be an extra or extra large edition issued “for the good of the party”—and more especially not, if the edition is issued to serve his party.
“It goes free anyway, so what is the difference?” the postmaster may argue, and with fairly valid grounds for such argument. The department, acting, pursuant of law, says “carry and distribute your local papers free inside your county.” So what difference does a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, more or less, make to the department?
Why, certainly, what difference can it make? It is all done for “the good of the party,” is it not?
This condition, governing, as I personally know it does govern, furnishes my chief reason for saying that the Postoffice Department does not know—does not know even approximately—the tonnage of the “free in county” matter it handles. It never has known and does not now know, within millions of pounds, the weight of such matter it carries and distributes.
Again, I ask, why is this vast burden thrown onto the department and the department getting not a cent of either pay or credit for carrying it? Is it because of a paternal feeling our federal government has for the poor, benighted farmers of the country? I can scarcely believe it is. The farmers of this country are neither poor nor are they benighted. If they were, free carriage and distribution to them of these local sheets has not enriched them to any appreciable extent, however much such free carriage and delivery may have added to the bank accounts of the publishers of such periodical literature. Besides, ninety-five in every hundred farmers whose names are on the publishers’ subscription books pay their subscriptions. They usually pay, too, a pretty stiff rate—$1.50 or $2.00 for a “weekly,” which gives them mostly borrowed news and much of it decidedly stale at that. If a beneficent government grants its “free in county” postal regulation with a view to dissipating the gloom which clogs the garrets of our “benighted farmers,” that government misses its purpose on two essential points. Our farmers, as previously intimated, are no more benighted than are the residents of our villages, towns and cities, and even if their ignorance was as dense as a “practical” politician’s conscience, the medium which the Government delivers to them, carriage free, seldom contributes much enlightenment.