I have probably quoted sufficient to show that Postmaster General Hitchcock is reaching for power and authority which should not be delegated to any bureau or cabinet head. The last statement is made, of course, in the confident belief that the reader joins me in the desire and confident hope that the basic principles of our government will be neither superseded nor abrogated by legislative grants of bureaucratic power and authority, which power and authority once granted is seldom or never recovered to a people without sanguinary action on their part, with all the waste of effort, vitality, money and human life usually a concomitant of such action.
There are several more of Postmaster General Hitchcock’s legislative recommendations I would like to quote, did space permit, but there is one other which I will quote, because it wears a sort of humoresque drapery when taken in connection with that “rider” Mr. Hitchcock so industriously tried to put through the necessary three-ring stunts required in the senatorial circus; also when taken in connection with a little, not separately stitched, brochure which Mr. Hitchcock turns loose on pages 7 and 8 of his most excellent, though ulteriorly tutoring, report.
On pages 7 and 8 the Postmaster General tells us, as best he can, under influenced and influencing conditions, the why and wherefore for his attempt to load his department deficit onto a few periodicals which he, likewise certain of his “influencers” possibly, does not like. Well, I want my readers to read this bit of official effort, in a wrong cause. I want them to read it in the raw, with no spring papering or decorating on it.
As has been my practice in quoting, I shall take occasion to italicize a little. But that will not cut any four-leaf clovers this early in the season. I italicize merely to call the reader’s attention to the elegant assertiveness of Mr. Hitchcock’s “style” and to his planned determination to “put it over” on those pestiferous periodicals—weekly and monthly—in spite of constitutional prohibitions, Senate rules or publishers’ opposition.
Stay! I have another reason for italicizing. I want the reader to read those italicized phrasings of Mr. Hitchcock’s unstitched brochure a second time, and to read them more carefully the second time than he did the first. If the reader will kindly do this we will be better acquainted, also be mutually better acquainted with Mr. Hitchcock and his dominating purpose, whether ulterior or other, in attacking a special class or division of periodical publications in order to recoup a deficit created wholly by the rural delivery service and by the free (franked and penalty), service rendered by his department. We will first quote his little second-class brochure and follow it with his humoresque legislative recommendation:
In the last annual report of the department special attention was directed to the enormous loss the government sustains in the handling and transportation of second-class mail. Owing to the rapid increase in the volume of such mail the loss is constantly growing. A remedy should be promptly applied by charging more postage. In providing for the higher rates it is believed that a distinction should be made between advertising matter and what is termed legitimate reading matter. Under present conditions an increase in the postage on reading matter is not recommended. Such an increase would place a special burden on a large number of second-class publications, including educational and religious periodicals, that derive little or no profit from advertising. It is the circulation of this type of publications, which aid so effectively in the educational and moral advancement of the people, that the government can best afford to encourage. For these publications, and also for any other legitimate reading matter in periodical form, the department favors a continuation of the present low postage rate of 1 cent a pound, and recommends that the proposed increase in rate be applied only to magazine advertising matter. This plan would be in full accord with the statute governing second-class mail, a law that never justified the inclusion under the second-class rates of the vast amounts of advertising now transported by the government at a tremendous loss.
Newspapers are not included in the plan for a higher rate on advertising matter because, being chiefly of local distribution, they do not burden the mails to any such extent as the widely circulating magazines.
Under the system proposed it will be possible, without increasing the expenditure of public funds, to utilize for the benefit of the entire people that considerable portion of the postal revenues now expended to meet the cost of a special privilege enjoyed by certain publishers.
In view of the vanishing postal deficit it is believed that if the magazines could be required to pay what it costs the government to carry their advertising pages, the department’s revenues would eventually grow large enough to warrant 1-cent postage on first class mail. Experiments made by the department show that the relative weights of the advertising matter and the legitimate reading matter in magazines can be readily determined, making it quite feasible to put into successful operation the plan outlined. Under that plan each magazine publisher will be required to certify to the local postmaster, in accordance with regulations to be prescribed by the department, the facts necessary to determine the proper postage charges. The method of procedure will be worked out in such manner as to insure the dispatching of the mails as expeditiously as at present. (Pages 7 and 8, 1910 Report.)
That sort of a literary hand-out may be all right for certain of our citizens transplanted from south European environment, likewise from malnutrition and inanition, by the ship load to this country, where most of them expected to find $1.50 or $2.00 per day growing on vines or low bushes—and found it, in most cases, too.