We have devoted most of our previous space to Mr. Hitchcock’s “rider,” to the influences and _influencers_ that originated it and tried to push it--by methods adroit and scrupulously unscrupulous--into federal enactment--into operative law. At this point of our presentation of the general subject of Postal Riders and Raiders, it was my original intention to take up generally the _raider_ features or elements as planned for discussion in this volume. I intended to start just here to discuss the Postoffice Department “deficit,” of which Mr. Hitchcock has had so much to say--and of which he made voluminous and eloquent use during his efforts to bring his “rider” a safe winner under the wire. I intended, as just said, to begin to write about the postal “deficit” just here--a deficit _which never had real existence_, since the days of the “pony post” and “mail coach,” save in quasi form--in methods covering political lootage and looters. Well, I have changed my original plan a little. I’ll run a few lines through that “deficit”--twaddle-talk, a little further on. Here I will merely repeat what I have already said, in substance at least. There never has been a postal deficit since the period I have indicated, save deficits created by official crooks and crookedness, by “interests” which _hired_ the official crooks and bought the crookedness, and by department accounting methods which would put Standard Oil or a Western cow ranch on the financial blink inside of thirty-six months, or even in twelve. We will discuss this artistic “deficit” later. Here I now desire to advert to, and animadvert on, another point which has been brought forcibly to my attention recently--weeks, some two months, after I climbed up here to take a look over the general situation, and then chanced, through the aid of a Congressman friend, to get my distance glasses focused on this postoffice foolery. Foolery, I have written. I was wrong. There was no foolery about it. It was a _calculated, a studied, a cold-blooded partisan stab at one of the greatest and most helpful--most up-building--industries in this country_. But we will let that point and the “deficit” rest for the present. It appears that one of Mr. Hitchcock’s much-worked arguments to harvest or glean votes for his rider amendment was that the amendment would “affect only a few magazine publishers,” or that “only a few magazine publishers, at most, would be affected by the amendment and that they had _enriched_ themselves by the special privilege granted by the second-class mail rate statute of 1885,” etc., etc. Various newspapers quoted Mr. Hitchcock variously on the same point or to the same end, and two Congressmen acquaintances reported that he had personally talked to them along the same lines.