Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

THE NET RESULT.

So, using the department’s own figures and methods of figuring, we have the cost of hauling and handling magazines, 5 cents plus 1.4 cents, or 6.4 cents; the cost of hauling and handling newspapers, 2 cents plus 6.75 cents, or 8.75 cents.

This shows that without going into the miscellaneous expenditures at all, which would slightly further increase the cost of newspapers as compared with magazines, the department’s own figures show that it is losing on the fundamental operations of hauling and handling 7.75 cents a pound on 426,223,803 pounds of newspapers, or $33,032,844.73, as against losing 5.4 cents a pound on 154,719,317 pounds of magazines, or $8,354,843.11.

With a loss, according to its own figures, over 400 per cent as great on newspapers as on magazines, the department goes to the magazines, of scarcely one-third the weight of newspapers, and with not one-twentieth the financial ability to pay such a new tax, to meet the whole burden of its futile and confiscatory attempt to reduce the deficit.

Furthermore, the advertising in magazines, which the department proposes to tax out of existence, is the very national mail-order advertising that produces the profitable revenue, as against the local announcements in the newspapers of the class of page department-store advertisements, etc., which do not call for answers through the mails under first-class postage (see Exhibit F).

And, still further, the modern newspaper of large circulation is more of a magazine, as distinguished from a paper chiefly devoted to disseminating news and intelligence and discussion of public affairs, than the modern magazine. Compare the “magazine sections” of the large newspapers (and most of the balance of their Sunday issues), with publications like the Review of Reviews, World’s Work, Current Literature, Literary Digest, Collier’s Weekly, or even with Everybody’s, the American, the Cosmopolitan and McClure’s, to see the obvious truth of this statement.

I have marked the fourth from last paragraph of the publishers’ “Exhibit C” to be set in italics. I did so for fear the hurried reader might gather a wrong impression from its wording. The publishers do not mean to say that it costs the government 7.75 cents a pound to carry and handle newspapers, nor 5.4 cents a pound to carry and handle magazines. It is a known fact that both the newspapers and the magazines can be carried and handled by the government at a profit at $20.00 a ton—at the cent-a-pound rate. Mr. Hitchcock asserted in the official brochure to which the publishers are here making reply, I take it, that second-class mail hauling and handling costs 9.23 cents a pound. In this “Exhibit C,” the publishers are proving that, even if his absurd claim as to cost were true, his method of apportioning that cost between newspapers and other periodicals is grossly unfair, as well as ridiculously wrong mathematically.

Then Mr. Hitchcock, or his department, suggests that the magazines meet the added charge put upon them for haul and handling by increasing their sale price. That is, let the five, ten or fifteen-cent weeklies ring up five cents more per copy on subscribed and news stand prices—make the readers pay it. Let the monthlies do likewise.

That suggestion carries a sort of familiar resonance. “Make the rate (tariff) what the traffic will stand.”

Ever hear of it? If you have not, then you must have arrived as a mission child in the Chinese or Hindoostanese “field of effort,” and have lived there until the week before last.