I have made the above quotation from Mr. Atkinson to evidence the fact that he and others support my view of Mr. Hitchcock’s attitude _now_, in relation to this second-class mail rate question. Mr. Atkinson shows quite conclusively that our Postmaster General is still, and stealthily, running the trail which the Penrose-Overstreet Commission _scented_ for him and urges publishers and the printing trades to be on their guard. Some pages back I adverted to the fact that the deficit of $6,000,000 for the fiscal year 1909-10 was the ground-plan of Mr. Hitchcock for an increase in second-class postage rates. That deficit he himself has converted into _a surplus of several thousands of dollars_. Why, then, is he still trailing those independent periodicals? Why, too, it is relevant to ask, did he so suddenly hear that the people of this country were crying for a cut of fifty per cent in first-class, or sealed, postage rates, much as the advertiser declares the children cry for Castoria? To the Man on the Ladder it appears that what Mr. Hitchcock heard must have been a “far cry”--very far. So far, indeed, that no one who did not have his _ear to an ulterior motive_ could hear it. You will observe that he worries a couple of years over a “deficit”--a little runabout, five H. P. deficit of $6,000,000. Then by doing a few things which common business sense imperatively dictates should be done, and which, it is well known among competents, any one of a dozen of Mr. Hitchcock’s predecessors should have done, or _could_ have done had not dirty politics blocked them--by doing just a _few_ of the business things which every student of the question knows could have been done and should have been done years ago, Mr. Hitchcock lost his “deficit”--his ground-plan for attack on second-class rates--_and found a surplus instead_. The Man on the Ladder does not desire to appear impertinent nor even finicky in his type conversation on this point, but in simple justice to the magnitude of the question he is constrained to ask: Is a “deficit” so essentially necessary to Mr. Hitchcock in a fight to put certain independent periodicals on the financial skids that he must, losing one deficit, _immediately set about creating another_?