Now, when one considers the broad application of the word “literature,” the word “arts,” comprehending as it does not only the mechanical and liberal or polite arts, but also business, commercial, mercantile and others, including the science of business management, and the term “special industry” and the broad field covered by it—when one considers the broad application of those words, it is a fairly legitimate inference that it was “in the mind” of the writer when drafting that ’79 statute to give a broad meaning and range of service to the publications he intended should be classed as periodicals.
In this connection it is pertinent to ask why periodical publications should not serve, either in their advertising pages or in their “body pages,” devoted to fiction and articles on political conditions, economics, history, the lives and deeds of men, forests and forestry, mills, mines, factory, farm and a vast array of other features, phases and conditions—why, I ask, should our periodicals not give aid by giving space to the great mercantile, manufacturing, financial, agricultural and other interests in this country—interests which, collectively, have built up a commerce more vast today than that of any other nation of earth?
Why should not this vast commerce of ours—a commerce in which every man, woman and child of our people is directly or indirectly interested—be aided and served in every legitimate way by our periodicals? Will some politically living member of that Penrose-Overstreet Commission rise and answer? Answer, not in hypercritical nothings, but straightly and bluntly?
Another immediately pertinent thing should be stated and another asked here. Among the instruments which have contributed to build up the great commerce of the nation, the American periodical must be recognized—is recognized—as one of the most efficient.
Why, then, this recent attempt to cripple, to curb, to lessen, its influence and effort? And why, again, try to curtail its circulation and usefulness by prattle about a postal “deficit” as reason for restrictive departmental rulings and laws when, should such restrictive measures be made effective, a shrinkage of postal revenues and a consequent increase of deficit would, necessarily, result?
Will some one whose thought-dome and pockets are not full of ulterior motives and postal service “deficits” please rise and answer?
Returning to the 1906-7 commission’s agony over the definition in the act of 1879 of what should be considered a periodical and, therefore, entitled to mail entry as second-class matter, it appears that the commissioners, in an apparent anxious anxiety to prove their charge against the author of the act for careless, ambiguous wording, quote a lawyer’s opinion, or part of such opinion, in support of the carefully framed-up “arguments” which it presents in didactic order, both before and after the quotation.
The quotation, it should be noted, is from the brief of the Postmaster General’s counsel in Houghton vs. Payne, 194 U. S. 88, or so the commission’s report designates it.
The point of the commission’s argument appears to be: (1) that owing to its loose, indefinite wording, the act of ’79 was of easy evasion when it came to passing upon the kind and character of matter which might be published in periodical form and mailed at second-class rates, and (2) that, by reason of such loose and indefinite wording, periodical publishers have evaded the intent and purpose of the act—have abused their second-class rate privileges—have violated the law.