HEARINGS BEFORE THE HUGHES POSTAL COMMISSION.
I intended to follow the hearings before this commission personally. Ill health prevented my doing so. Under this stress, I asked my friend, Mr. M. H. Madden, quoted on a previous page in connection with other phases of our general subject, to summarize for me the hearings of the commission in August. Mr. Madden kindly consented to do so. Following is what he writes me relating to the commission’s proceedings and hearings:
The first meeting of the commission took place on August 1, and it continued its hearings in New York City, with occasional adjournments during the greater part of the month.
Postmaster General Hitchcock represented his department before the commission, Second Assistant Stewart and Third Assistant Britt were also present, each in turn occupying the stand. Hitchcock outlined his position concerning a demand for an increase for the first time, although the same idea was expressed by Third Assistant Britt some months ago, when Britt made an address before a convention of newspaper circulation managers in Chicago. Hitchcock and his two assistants held to the view that each schedule in the postal service should be made self-sustaining, the credit for this idea being given to Hitchcock, and in order to justify his position concerning a raise in second-class rates an arbitrary figure has been placed on the cost of handling the same, the total “deficit” from this schedule being placed at about $70,000,000 annually. This amount was arrived at by what Second Assistant Postmaster General Stewart states was a complete record of the weighing of all mail handled by the Postoffice Department of matter originating in every postoffice and railway postoffice in the country for a period of six months from July 1 to December 1, 1907, together with the amount of mail carried in every railway car. The department in many instances has admitted the unreliability of the figures used, there having been many estimates employed.
Publishers of the country were represented by several attorneys who examined into the testimony given by Hitchcock, Stewart and Britt, and by a series of questions they showed that the conclusions of the three as to cost of handling second-class mail were made on a guesswork plan and not on a scientific or reasonably accurate basis of fact. Third Assistant Postmaster General Britt made the startling statement that “if all the magazines and newspapers were excluded from the second-class rates because of a circulation gained, _not on the merits_ of the publication, but _because of some voting contest or offer of premiums as a bait, not 10 per cent. of the total would remain undisturbed_.”