Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

2. The periodical fiction published in our leading magazines and weeklies has taught our people lessons in morals, in politics, in political economy, in social, domestic and industrial life. It has told its readers of the habits and habitat of animals, of birds and bees; of flowers, of fruits and forestry. Nor has there been much of “nature faking” in it. Some of the most informative matter ever printed bearing upon natural history, the geography, topography and hydrography of this earth, has reached us through the periodical fiction of the past ten or twelve years. Not only that, but such fiction has gone to the farm and into the laboratory, into the mine, the factory, the mill, and the lumber camp; into the mercantile establishment, into transportation, both rail and water; into the counting room, into the “sweat-shop” and into the tenement districts, the purlieus and the “submerged tenths” in both the lower and higher “walks” of the world’s various and varying civilizations, and it has taught us things we did not before know.

Then why should new laws be enacted, or old laws be twisted, turned or misconstrued, to exclude “fiction”—periodical fiction—from the second-class mail rate privilege?

One other objection I find to this 1906-7 commission’s report. It recommends the appointment of a “Commission of Postal Appeals.”

The report states that certain publishers favored such a commission. That be as it may, I do not believe that such a commission will return service value at all commensurate with the amount of public money it would cost to keep its wheels “greased” and operating. Next to a bureaucracy, government by commissions is the worst. Can the reader think of a “Commission”—a Government, a State, County or City Commission—that ever discharged, promptly and satisfactorily, the duties assigned to it? One is put to no trouble to think of scores of Civil Service Commissions, Forestry Commissions, Subway Commissions, Canal Commissions, Traction Commissions, Railroad Commissions, Postal Commissions, Inter-State Commerce Commissions and a host of others.

But do you know of one of them that ever did any real serviceable work for the people—did it until an aroused and hostile public opinion kicked it into doing the work?

You may know of one. The Man on the Ladder knows of none, and he has been watching the service value of the “commission” for thirty-five years. As a governing instrument it has largely been a subversive instrument. It always spends its appropriation. It always puts as many of its uncles, brothers and nephews on the pay roll and takes as many junkets as is possible under its appropriation and, if the appropriation is exceeded, it usually asks for more and—gets it.

We have an Interstate Commerce Commission. It has been on the job ever since John Sherman put it on duty. Sherman knew what he intended—wanted—it to do. Did it do what he and the rest of us depended on it to do? Well, not to any noticeable extent. It spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of our money while it permitted the railroads and express companies to rebate, “differential” and “short” and “long” haul us out of hundreds of millions of easy or stolen dollars.

O yes! of course the Interstate Commerce Commission is, of late, getting down to business—getting down to the work John Sherman intended it to do when he drafted the bill which created it.

Why has that commission finally arrived at its starting point? Why is it now trying to do—and trying, even yet, to do it in a loose, dilatory way—what Sherman intended it to do?

“Why?” Why, simply because the people have finally learned—thanks largely to the enlightenment given them by the independent periodicals of the country—that they have been governmentally treated as fools—that they have been treated as sheep to furnish fleece and mutton for a few who feast and wear fine raiment, yet earn it not.