1. There are more high-class newspapers—papers which, necessarily, have weight—published in this country than is published in all the rest of the world.
2. There are four times as many of what the 1906-7 commission—also Postmaster General Hitchcock—would class as “periodicals” published in this country as are published in all the rest of the world.
Sounds “loud,” does it? Well, look into the matter. Maybe I am mistaken. If so, it is a mistake made after thirty years of study of the conditions controlling in my country—in your country—and of the prices paid in other countries for efficient, satisfactory service.
3. Those “other countries”—the stronger ones, at any rate—either own or absolutely control the railroads which transport their mails. In some of them, rail transportation of mails—also of government officials, the service personnel of the army and the navy, and of other government “weight”—are carried free of charge.
4. Those “other countries,” of which so much is said and written ostensibly for our enlightenment, have gone through the mill—their peoples have been ground fine in mills of sophistry and special pleadings, to which, for fifty years, we have been carrying our grists.
5. Those “other countries” are making their mail service a source of governmental revenue.
The people of this country, today, no more expect a revenue from the government’s postal service than they expect it from the War, the Navy, the Interior, the Judicial or other service department.
The people want service, not revenues, from any federal service department.
And you gentlemen who vote away the people’s money for services not rendered—which you know will not be rendered when you vote to “burn” the money—will, before those independent periodicals are through with the recent sand-bagging attempt to censor or control their published thought—you will learn, I mean to say, that people want service not revenues; that they want “duty,” as an engineer would name it, not a coached prattle about B. T. U. or other legislative and official thermics.
Now, let us look back at that quotation—at some of the points in it I have italicized.