Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

I shall make no further specific reference to the fifty improvements the Postmaster General claims to have covered into operative effectiveness. It is due, however, that I say, in this connection, that the majority of those named in the report are sound, sane and serviceably economic. It is also due from me to say that I personally know that Mr. Hitchcock has already made a number of them effectively operative in his department and to the betterment of its service. My contention with the Postmaster General is chiefly concerning three points, viz.:

First—His manifest intent to throw the burden of his departmental deficit upon a few independent periodicals which, by reason of their independence, have indulged the proclivity or practice of telling the truth about corporate, vested and other favored interests, and about corrupt officials—city, county, state, national, executive, legislative and juridic.

Second—His colossally unjust and unfair way of figuring his “deficit” against such periodicals. Maybe it was Britt, Third Assistant Postmaster General, or some other “pied” subordinate who did the figuring. I do not know. However, in common with other citizens, I hold Mr. Hitchcock responsible for those figures, as we are fully warranted in doing by reason of his official position.

Third—Mr. Hitchcock, it appears, in his reports and letters, gives us a lot of talk that is twisted, “pretzel talk,” someone has aptly called it. This “night-crawler” talk quite naturally—legitimately, if not naturally—leaves thoughtful people to wonder what he wants, what he is after, what interest or interests he is trying to subserve and what “influences” have influenced him to go after certain periodicals in so bald and crude a way.

Still, that does not altogether fully express my third objection to Mr. Hitchcock and his methods. His letters and special reports in support of the absurd claim that the transportation and handling of second-class mail matter costs 9.23 cents per pound, a figure above or equal to that which will carry gold or currency bills by express for the average mail haul, furnish valid grounds for doubt as to the good faith of his intent, to suspicion an ulterior motive back of his action and writings. To this I do not hesitate to say that his 1910 report, I mean his own personally signed section of it, is offensively bureaucratic. Mr. Hitchcock, it appears from his own recommendations, would have his bureau or department bigger than Congress. He wants powers and authority centered in it which Congress should not delegate, which Congress has no rightful powers nor authority to delegate.

Now, do not misapprehend me. Maybe Mr. Hitchcock has not done all this on his own initiative. He may have acted wholly on a long-distance or a central direction from the main stem. I shall, however, proceed to support my accusation that Mr. Hitchcock evidences in his 1910 report a desire—a tendency, if not a desire,—to make the Postmaster General not only a censor of periodical literature (as indicated in the wording of that “rider” amendment printed on a previous page), but to have delegated to him powers over the mail service which not only contravene the basic principles of a democratic form of government, but which, also, tend to establish a bureaucracy that, if carried to its full flower, will, necessarily abrogate our form of government itself.

Here let us note Mr. Hitchcock’s recommended legislation. In the report before me he makes thirty-six recommendations. In each of these which grants added powers or authority touching any matter, the wording of the suggested legislation gives such added powers and authority to the Postmaster General. In certain minor matters, especially such as relate only to departmental methods of handling its service accounts, etc., such grant of power is entirely proper. Among Mr. Hitchcock’s recommendations are several of such character, and, so far as I have studied them, they appear sound, and consequently their passage by Congress and their application to the department would, in my judgment, effect material savings or betterments in the service.

In a number of other instances, however, Mr. Hitchcock asks legislation that will grant him (or any succeeding head of the federal Postoffice Department), powers and authority which should be granted to no bureau or departmental division of our government service. I mean that the acquirement of such legislative powers and authority by bureaus (cabinet service divisions), is inimical to the basic principles of our government; in fact, it is a stealthy move to establish in this country the bureaucratic form of government which has proved a curse in every existing monarchical government, causing their peoples to rebel against them, or constantly a condition of unrest under the system—a condition which indicates either enforced submission to governmental wrongs and impositions or a dwarfed and submerged manhood, “begging for leave to live” and devoting most of its thought to a few questions, such as: “Why did I arrive? What am I here for? I work, why does the government take most of my earnings? Why does the government and its bureau heads live, live in luxury, while I and my wife and children merely exist,—barely subsist? Why are hundreds of millions taken every year from people who need it to secure the common comforts of life, and given, unearned, to those who need it not at all?”

It would require pages even to print the inquiries which the victims of bureaucratic governments ask themselves daily, ask themselves daily so long as they exist above the level of the clod, above the level which Edward Markham so forcefully and eloquently depicts in his “Man with the Hoe.”

The point I desire to emphasize is that when the great body of people in any country—its “citizens”—begin to ask themselves such questions, their patriotism begins to dry-rot and die, and when the patriotism of a nation’s people begins to die, that nation is on the farther slope of its existence; it has started on the decline, more or less sharp, which ends in rebellion, dissolution, extinction. This is the uniform lesson of history. He who reads it not so reads either not carefully or not comprehendingly.