Will some one whose thought-dome and _pockets_ are not full of ulterior motives and postal service “deficits” please rise and answer?
Returning to the 1906-7 commission’s agony over the definition in the act of 1879 of what should be considered a periodical and, therefore, entitled to mail entry as second-class matter, it appears that the commissioners, in an apparent _anxious_ anxiety to prove their charge against the author of the act for careless, ambiguous wording, quote a lawyer’s opinion, or part of such opinion, in support of the carefully framed-up “arguments” which it presents in didactic order, both before and after the quotation.
The quotation, it should be noted, is from the brief of the Postmaster General’s counsel in Houghton vs. Payne, 194 U. S. 88, or so the commission’s report designates it.
The point of the commission’s argument appears to be: (1) that owing to its loose, indefinite wording, the act of ’79 was of easy evasion when it came to passing upon the kind and character of matter which might be published in periodical form and mailed at second-class rates, and (2) that, by reason of such loose and indefinite wording, periodical publishers _have_ evaded the intent and purpose of the act--have abused their second-class rate privileges--_have violated the law_.
That, at any rate, I read as the point and purpose of the commission’s somewhat labored, if not strained, argument. They quote (pages 37-38) this counsel in support of that argument. I shall here reprint that quotation as evidence that the publisher of “the universally recognized, commonly accepted, and perfectly well understood periodical of everyday speech” (see fifth paragraph of quotation) _have not violated the law nor sought to do so_.
The quoted opinion presents some italicized words, phrases and clauses as it appears in the report. I have taken the liberty to further italicize in reprinting it:
“The next words only strengthen the same idea--originated and published _for the dissemination of information of a public character_. Not, it will be observed, that it shall _contain_ information of a public character, but shall be published _for the dissemination of_ such public information. Each of these words is significant, and each gathers significance from its neighbors. _Dissemination_ is here a word of strong color and tinges all the rest. It indicates a dynamic process, an agency at work carrying out a purpose for which it was originated and set in motion. But strong as the word dissemination is, it is fortified by the use of the word _information_. An agency for the dissemination of knowledge for example, might better consist with the idea of a library of books. But the word is not knowledge, but _information_. The distinction is obvious. One has the sense of accumulated stores; the other of _imparting the idea of things for current needs_. One is, as it were, human experience at rest; the other, human experience in action. One may be as stale as you please; the other must be new, fresh, vital. A book, a volume, is the medium of one; a journal the medium of the other.