That is, he would do so, if the hens had attended to their legitimate business as industriously as they looked after his vegetable garden and, by reason of that legitimate effort, showed a “profit balance.” The preceding is based, of course, on the assumption that the rancher has acumen enough to distinguish a hen from a rooster and a sunflower from a cauliflower. If he is so wised up, whether by experience and observation or by academic training, he will most certainly charge his loss on vegetables against those hens.
“What is the application of all this to the Postoffice Department deficits?” some one is justified in asking.
Well, my intended application of it is, first, to show a generally recognized and practical business method--a business method practiced by both public and private corporations and by individuals and firms, from the hen-rancher to the department store. My second purpose is to show that this almost universally recognized business method has been and is _totally ignored in conducting the vast service affairs_ of the Federal Postoffice Department.
The 1910 report of the Postoffice Department states that 55,639,177 pounds of second-class mail was carried and distributed _free_ in the counties of these United States.
Of course, this 1910 _gift_ to country publishers is the result of a moss-grown custom--a custom born of an ingrown desire common to crooked politicians--a desire to trade the general public service for _private_ service. All the second, third and fourth class cities in the country, as well as a majority of our towns and larger incorporated villages, have their _party_ newspaper or newspapers.
Comparatively speaking, few of them have any extensive telegraphic service, if any at all, in the gathering of news. Those which have not, capture the early morning editions--or the late evening editions of the day before--of two or more metropolitan papers, “crib” their “news” and deliberately run it, in many instances, as special wires to their own sheets. In some cases, which I have personally noticed, that practice was indulged when their own “newspaper” consisted of but two to four locally printed pages reinforced by a “patent inside.” Why should such newspapers (?) be given “free distribution” in the county of publication?