I think that any informed, fair-minded reader will agree that that statement is a fair statement of governing facts, unless we question the honesty of our courts in the discharge of their judicial duties or question the juridic honesty of some member or members of the ruling court.
That may read like a blunt or offensive way of putting it. But we are not writing of a Palm Beach twilight party nor of a Newport frolic. We are writing of and _to_ a serious subject--a subject which vitally touches and trenches into the vital interests of ninety millions of people--the ninety millions who are the blood and bone and sinew of this nation of ours. It is a subject of such grave import as to make it necessary that we call a spade a spade, a thief a thief, a scoundrel a scoundrel, and judicial weakness, judicial _treachery_.
That is why I put, plain and strong, the point that _no court_ could be found in this country to sustain legislation of the character covered in Mr. Hitchcock’s “rider” amendment to the 1911 postoffice appropriation bill, and that every informed, fair-minded man must concur in the statements that I have made in the three or four preceding paragraphs.
That “rider” amendment would “affect only a few magazine publishers,” says Mr. Hitchcock, or as he is reported to have said.
Now, let us look over the field a little. Let us make an honest, intelligent effort--an effort not warped by political hopes and aspirations nor by _personal prejudices and interests_--to see who or whom would be affected by such special or class legislation.
First, the reader must get a mental hip-lock or strangle-hold on the fact that the second-class mail _business_ of this country--the output of periodical publishers--in marketed values, is somewhere around _one billion dollars a year_.
As has previously been stated, and I believe well sustained by the facts, no business, however well established, can stand an increase of 300 per cent in the haulage and delivery cost of its output without sustaining great financial loss. The fair-minded reader will, I believe, agree that the publishers in presenting their case to Mr. Hitchcock, to the Penrose-Overstreet and other commissions, proved the truth of that statement quite conclusively.