Then Mr. Hitchcock, or his department, suggests that the magazines meet the added charge put upon them for haul and handling by _increasing their sale price_. That is, let the five, ten or fifteen-cent weeklies ring up five cents more per copy on subscribed and news stand prices--_make the readers pay it_. Let the monthlies do likewise. That suggestion carries a sort of familiar resonance. “Make the rate (tariff) what the traffic will stand.” Ever hear of it? If you have not, then you must have arrived as a mission child in the Chinese or Hindoostanese “field of effort,” and have lived there until the week before last. _Ring up the revenues and make the dear people pay it in added purchase price!_ The people have a few dollars stored away in savings accounts or stockings, and if they want a thing they will broach their hoardings. They have the money. We _want_ it. One of the surest and easiest ways to get it is to _make them pay more for what they consider essentials_ to their subsistence, to the comforts and the pleasures of their lives. They have been buying some splendid monthly periodicals at twelve and a half cents to fifteen cents. If they want them, why not make ’em pay twenty or twenty-five cents? Yes, why not? It’s the people, and--well-- “To hell with the people.” For four decades or more of our history, that “official” opinion of the “dear people” has delivered the goods. The Congress, or certain “fixed” members of it, told us that we needed, in order to be entirely prosperous and happy, a tariff on “raw” wool, “raw” cotton, “raw” hides, “raw” sugar and several other “raws,” assuring us that such action would greatly inure to our benefit. They _lied_, of course. But it took us fool people a generation or more to find out that fact. In that generation, the liars gathered multiplied millions of unearned wealth and passed it into the hands of “innocent holders,” most of whom, if our court news columns are correct, have been spending it to get away from the trousered or the skirted heirs they married. The point, however, I desire to make here is that while this varied and various “raw” talk was being ladled to us--and most of us ordering a second serving--our patriotic friends in positions of legislative authority, and our commercial and business “friends” who steered the “raw” talk, had “cornered” all the home-grown raw and were _selling us the manufactured product at two prices_. But this is aside. I inject it here merely to illustrate how easily and _continuously_ we fool people are fooled. Postmaster General Hitchcock’s prattle about the publishers recouping themselves by lifting the price on us is of a kind with all the other “raw” talk which has looted us for forty or more years. We buy a _better_ periodical--say a monthly--for fifteen cents today than we got for fifty cents thirty years ago.