Before that date and since he has repeatedly asserted, both in print and “interview,” that second-class mail costs the government 9.23 cents per pound to transport and handle. Do you see the equivocating “ulterior” in this bit of recommended legislation? If you do not, just go into the back yard and kick yourself until you awaken to the fact and then come back and read Mr. Britt’s statement, page 328 of the 1910 report. Britt is Third Assistant Postmaster General and knows—well, he knows so much that he has to space-write in order to fill in about sixty pages of this 1910 report. But, as I have to take notice of Mr. Britt’s furnished data later, I shall give him no more attention at this point.
I believe that I have either furnished the evidence to prove the purpose, the ulterior purpose, of Postmaster General Hitchcock, or of his influences, to punish certain periodicals, to penalize them for telling the truth, likewise to acquire bureaucratic powers to give his department the right of censorship over our periodical literature; not only that, but to have the successful introduction of a parcels post dependent on conditions of his own choosing.
CHAPTER V.
THE PENROSE-OVERSTREET COMMISSION.
Next we will again take notice of Postmaster General Hitchcock’s peculiar figures. I do not know where he learned how to do it, but his “figerin’” has any expert accountant on the mat taking the count. He is certainly a “phenom”—or his Third Assistant, Mr. Britt, or other aid, is the “phenom.” At any rate the figures Mr. Hitchcock and his third “assist” are wonderfully, likewise mysteriously, worked into a little third-grade problem which makes it look like a proposition in trigonometry or fluxions.
It’s too complicated for me. I never had the advantage of hulling beans in Massachusetts. My cornfield arithmetic was all acquired in Illinois. So, instead of permitting myself to become enmeshed in Mr. Hitchcock’s figures, I shall resort to my frequently used tactics. I shall quote.
I have before me several analyses of Mr. Hitchcock’s peculiar application of the “double-rule-of-three,” as the schoolmaster used to call it down in that little school house at the cross roads in District 6, Town. 17, R. 3 E. The schoolmaster used to divide his time between “’rithmetic” and lamming. I graduated with honors in the latter. ’Rithmetic never seemed to take kindly to me—save to push me along in the lamming course. But——
Well, that is sufficient explanation to the reader to give broad, likewise legitimate, grounds for excusing me if I dodge, or try to dodge, Mr. Hitchcock and his Third Assistant when they get down to “figerin’.”
Candidly I am at a loss to know why young men of their physical robustness and their abnormal—yes, phenomenal—super-excellence in the matter of figuring things out, should be frittering away their time on a loafing job with the government. They ought to be holding down the chairs of Mathematics and of Expert Accounting at Onion Run University, or at some other advanced institution of learning.