Yet Mr. Hitchcock recommends that the cent-a-pound rate shall continue to be extended to such single copies—a most just and sensible recommendation.
But Mr. Hitchcock when he wrote that bit of recommended legislation was thinking—and thinking only, if indeed he gave the subject any personal thought at all—of curbing the circulation growth of periodicals and, as a means to that end, recommends the exclusion of all sample copies from the pound-rate privilege.
Read carelessly or superficially that bit of suggested legislation in itself does not appear to have anything to do with sample copies. On second and more careful reading, however, its purpose becomes clear. If the cent-a-pound rate is to be allowed only to regularly subscribed copies of a periodical, then all sample copies must be mailed, if mailed at all, at the third-class rate—must pay eight cents a pound.
When it comes to covering or cloaking ulterior purpose or intent in legislation, Mr. Hitchcock is an expert, it would appear from the rider he so strenuously tried to put astride the 1911-12 postoffice appropriation bill, and from the foregoing as well as some others of his suggestions to Congress. But the point to which I more especially desire to call to the reader’s attention when I obtruded that last preceding quotation at a point where it interrupted a consideration of the Penrose-Overstreet Commission’s report was this:—
As previously stated, Mr. Hitchcock’s 1910 report bears date, December 1, 1910. On that date, as appears from the last quotation, he desired a law that would bar all sample copies from the mails at the present second-class rate. It also appears that Mr. Hitchcock at the date named—December, 1, 1910—desired that all periodicals issued, except sample copies, be carried, as now, at the cent-a-pound rate.
Somewhere around February 1, 1911—barely two months after he makes that cent-a-pound recommendation—we hear Mr. Hitchcock assertively declaring, and contentiously arguing, that it costs the government 9.23 cents per pound to transport and handle second-class matter.
What happened to his mental gear in so short a time to induce so loud a change in his mind?
Or was it a change of mind? On page 328 of that 1910 departmental report, Mr. Britt, Third Assistant Postmaster General, who has charge of the accounting division of the service, makes the bold statement that it cost the government $62,438,644.70 more to carry and handle the second-class mail last year than was received for the service. Being an “expert” figurer Mr. Britt found no difficulty in arriving at that absurd 9.23 cents a pound as the actual cost to the government of carrying and handling second-class mail. On pages 7 and 8 of the report, Mr. Hitchcock himself gives publicity to a conviction that the cent-a-pound rate should be increased on certain periodicals—the magazines—generously suggesting that the increased rate be confined to their “advertising pages” only. In the loosely worded “rider” he carelessly—or purposely—uses the word “sheets” in place of the word “pages” as used in his report.
Still, in face of his Third Assistant’s lofty figuring, the conclusions of which are announced on page 328 of the report, and of his own statement of the “reasons for an increase of rate” on periodicals of the magazine class, for carrying and handling their “advertising pages”—in face of these statements, how did his mental gear so slip, or “jam,” as to induce him to recommend, on page 35 of this same report, the enactment of a law continuing the cent-a-pound rate on all periodicals mailed, except sample copies?