If there is a congressional murmur or a legislative growl about cutting down a rail rate, the rail men immediately set the welkin a-ring with a howl about “ruin.” If someone rises with vocal noise enough to be heard in protest against paying 29 cents a pound for Belteschazzar’s “nut-fed,” “sugar-cured,” “embalmed” hams and insists that they should be on the market everywhere at not to exceed 23 cents, Bel. and his cohorts will immediately curdle all the milk in the country with a noise about ruin! _ruin!_ RUIN! If some statesman rises in his place and offers an amendment reducing the tariff on “K,” or cotton, or sugar; or providing that the government shall build two instead of four “first-class” battleships, the bugles are all turned loose tooting “ruin” for the “wool,” the “cotton,” the “shipbuilding” or other industry affected, as the case may be, and “_ruin_” will be spread and splattered in printers’ ink all over the country. No, your Man on the Ladder does not have much respect for this “ruin” talk, as it is usually “stumped” and “space-written” for us commoners in the industrial walks of life and in its marts of trade. But when he hears that warning sounded by men engaged in a business industry with which he himself is fairly familiar--a business he himself has several times had to put forth strenuous effort to “lighter” over financial shoals or “spar-off” monetary reefs--when it comes to talk of “ruin” among men engaged in the business of publishing periodical literature in this country, why, then, he gets down off the ladder and _listens_. There are two special and specific reasons why _every_ commoner--every _earner_--should listen to the publishers’ arguments in proof that Mr. Hitchcock’s proposal means ruin to many of them--some of _even the strongest and best_. 1. An increase of _three hundred per cent_, as the Postmaster General sought in his “rider” (though somewhat covertly), in the carriage cost and delivery (rail or other) of its product would _ruin_ almost any established business there is in this country, if such increase was forced in the limited time named in that “rider.” A suddenly enforced increase of even one hundred per cent in the haulage and delivery cost of product would put hundreds of our most serviceable industries on the financial rocks. 2. A business man or a business industry that has been giving us _thirty cents in manufacturing cost_ for our _fifteen cents in cash_ is certainly deserving not only of a hearing but of a vigorous, robust, militant support. That the periodical publishers of this country are doing just that thing--_have been doing it for the past twelve to twenty years_--no honest periodical reader who is at all familiar with the cost of production will attempt to deny. That is sufficient reason for presenting here the “Exhibit E” of the publishers: