Below follows the detailed record, eloquent of what would happen if the prices of popular American magazines were increased 50 per cent to the public. In this Canadian incident the price of the Review of Reviews was increased only 16⅔ per cent and the circulation fell off 69 per cent.
REVIEW OF REVIEWS—CANADIAN SUBSCRIBERS.
The next exhibit (“Exhibit E”) of the publishers shows quite conclusively “that it would be ruinous to them to raise the rates in the manner proposed,” and Senator Owen presents their plea.
I am going to reprint here their plea as presented in “Exhibit E,” but in doing so The Man on the Ladder desires to remark that the argument, as it has been megaphoned into our ears for the past three or four decades, that an increase of tax rate (whatever the nature of the tax), or a reduction of the tariff or selling rate would be “ruinous,” does not cut much kindling in his intellectual woodshed. It has been entirely a too common yodle either to interest or to instruct any intelligent man who has been watching the play and listening to the concert for forty years. This “ruinous” talk has been out of the cut glass, Louis XVI, Dore, Dolesche and other high-art classes ever since Mrs. Vanderbilt, as was alleged, discovered that Chauncey M. Depew was merely her husband’s servant, just as was her coachman.
If there is a congressional murmur or a legislative growl about cutting down a rail rate, the rail men immediately set the welkin a-ring with a howl about “ruin.” If someone rises with vocal noise enough to be heard in protest against paying 29 cents a pound for Belteschazzar’s “nut-fed,” “sugar-cured,” “embalmed” hams and insists that they should be on the market everywhere at not to exceed 23 cents, Bel. and his cohorts will immediately curdle all the milk in the country with a noise about ruin! ruin! RUIN!
If some statesman rises in his place and offers an amendment reducing the tariff on “K,” or cotton, or sugar; or providing that the government shall build two instead of four “first-class” battleships, the bugles are all turned loose tooting “ruin” for the “wool,” the “cotton,” the “shipbuilding” or other industry affected, as the case may be, and “ruin” will be spread and splattered in printers’ ink all over the country. No, your Man on the Ladder does not have much respect for this “ruin” talk, as it is usually “stumped” and “space-written” for us commoners in the industrial walks of life and in its marts of trade. But when he hears that warning sounded by men engaged in a business industry with which he himself is fairly familiar—a business he himself has several times had to put forth strenuous effort to “lighter” over financial shoals or “spar-off” monetary reefs—when it comes to talk of “ruin” among men engaged in the business of publishing periodical literature in this country, why, then, he gets down off the ladder and listens.
There are two special and specific reasons why every commoner—every earner—should listen to the publishers’ arguments in proof that Mr. Hitchcock’s proposal means ruin to many of them—some of even the strongest and best.
1. An increase of three hundred per cent, as the Postmaster General sought in his “rider” (though somewhat covertly), in the carriage cost and delivery (rail or other) of its product would ruin almost any established business there is in this country, if such increase was forced in the limited time named in that “rider.” A suddenly enforced increase of even one hundred per cent in the haulage and delivery cost of product would put hundreds of our most serviceable industries on the financial rocks.
2. A business man or a business industry that has been giving us thirty cents in manufacturing cost for our fifteen cents in cash is certainly deserving not only of a hearing but of a vigorous, robust, militant support.