I quoted from Senator Owen on a previous page when discussing the unconstitutionality of Senate revenue-originating amendments. Under his leave to print Senator Owen embodied in his remarks on February 25, 1911, the arguments presented by some of the publishers in reply to Mr. Hitchcock’s statements. They point out in particular his peculiar method of figuring by which he reaches results so at variance with the facts as, at times, to be far more amusing than informative. I shall here quote some of them. I have previously adverted to the promptitude of Senators Owen, Bristow, Bourne, Cummings and others in getting onto the firing line. Their combined resistance soon forced Mr. Hitchcock to unmask his guns. He was ready, it would seem, to do or concede almost anything _provided_, always and of course, he could give a few of those pestiferous, independent magazines a jar that would so agitate their several bank accounts as to influence them to print what they were _told_ to print. But when the General found that he was flanked, and his position being shot up, he began to display parley and peace signals. “The country newspapers would not be affected”--they would still be carried and distributed free--55,000,000 pounds of them or more each and every calendar year. The “poor farmer” needs special government aid, you know. Or, if the farmer should not be personally in need of government assistance, as now it frequently and numerously chances, why, well--oh, well, we desire to show our friendly “leanin’s toward him.” He may remember it at the next Presidential election--just when we may be needing a few farmer votes. So, as one evidence of our kindly consideration for the farmer, we will not trench upon his _special privilege_. He shall still have delivered him--free--fifty-five to seventy million pounds of “patent insides” and other partisan dope sheets, printed in his own county and published and edited by regularly indentured, branded and tagged political fence-builders--guaranteed “safe” under the pure food laws, etc. Then Postmaster General Hitchcock also let it be generally known that it was remote from his intentions to add a mail-rate penalty to any religious, educational, fraternal or scientific periodical. Some of these--not including the Sunday School leaflets, of course--circulate in vast editions ranging from 500 to 5,000 copies a month. They, too, were such “powerful educational instruments,” he or some of his assistants assured doubting Thomases in both the upper and the lower branches of federal legislation. Next, he back-stepped a little to assure trade journals that it was not his purpose to hand them any advance over the cent-a-pound mail rate, or so at least, Washington correspondents reported. Finally it is said, a statement generously borne out by the wording of his jockeyed “rider,” that newspapers--_all newspapers_--would be fanned through the mail service at the old cent-a-pound rate.