In short, the commission’s position regarding the publication of fiction in periodical form contravenes the “real purpose” of the law. So, also, does its position on several points it seeks to bolster in its report contravene the real purpose of that act, as I have previously shown, quoting in one instance the opinion of a Postmaster General’s counsel, which opinion the commission itself quoted to support a _false position_.
I feel constrained to make another point against the stand this commission took against the admissibility to the second class mail rate privilege of periodicals largely devoted to fiction.
It appears to me that these commissioners must have confined their reading in recent years largely to the older and so-called “classic” fiction, to professional tomes, to juridic opinions, attorney’s briefs, and to “booster” stuff for parties and candidates published in our newspapers. Certainly they could not have read much of the periodical fiction published by our high-class monthlies and weeklies. If they had done so, they would not, it seems to me, have written so loosely and _unwarrantedly_ of the “fiction” in their report.
Had they read much of the fiction appearing in the leading periodicals during current and recent years, they would have learned at least two facts about it:
1. Much--yes, most--of the fiction printed during recent years in our standard periodicals (even in those printing only fiction as “body matter”), has been highly didactic or educational in character.
2. The periodical fiction published in our leading magazines and weeklies has taught our people lessons in morals, in politics, in political economy, in social, domestic and industrial life. It has told its readers of the habits and habitat of animals, of birds and bees; of flowers, of fruits and forestry. Nor has there been much of “nature faking” in it. Some of the most informative matter ever printed bearing upon natural history, the geography, topography and hydrography of this earth, has reached us through the periodical fiction of the past ten or twelve years. Not only that, but such fiction has gone to the farm and into the laboratory, into the mine, the factory, the mill, and the lumber camp; into the mercantile establishment, into transportation, both rail and water; into the counting room, into the “sweat-shop” and into the tenement districts, the purlieus and the “submerged tenths” in both the lower and higher “walks” of the world’s various and varying civilizations, and it has _taught us things_ we did not before know.