Those periodicals, I started to say, have given more real educational benefit to the adult population of this country during the past ten years than has been given by all the “little red school houses,” colleges, universities, and churches combined.
I do not, as you will notice, include the “political stump.” I do not care to comment on its peculiar didactic value or fascination for fools. That means both you and me, reader. We each, occasionally, go to hear the political “stumper” tell us a lot of “influenced” lies.
The third statement I wish to make is: Postmaster General Hitchcock is, so far as the writer has been able to learn, a politician. Not only is he a politician, the reports read, but he is a wise, smooth and “ambitious” politician.
That is bad. “Why?” Well, because an “ambitious” politician is about as useful to us, to you and to me, as are bugs in our potato patch, or dry rot in our sheep herd. The “ambitious” politician is a disease, attacking either our kitchen garden or our mutton supply.
“What’s the answer?”
Here is one answer: It is a long way between “three rooms rear and a palace.” But even they who crawl about the earth, begging for leave to live, see things, hear things, feel things, and read things. They are beginning to understand much of what they see, hear, feel and read.
Is that, Mr. Hitchcock, a reason, one of the reasons, why you who have so energetically, likewise offensively, tried to shut us out from our main source of information, from our mental commissary?
Arise, please, and answer.
There are still other remarks which I must make about Mr. Hitchcock’s peculiar recent action and talk. It may not be at all pleasant to him. Yet the statements I shall make, I am ready to support by a “cloud of witnesses.”
As before stated, this attempt to muzzle the press of the country, for that appears to be the ultimate, likewise the ulterior, purpose of Mr. Hitchcock and his coterie of senatorial and other abettors in their recent attempt to outrage the constitutional rights of our people, the constitutional rights of the Lower House and the rules of both Senate and House, as Senator Robert L. Owen, in brief but pertinent remarks in the recent closing days of the late session (February 25, 1911), pointed out,—remarks rife with the cogency of truth.